The Frustration of Gradual Progress

Like every person who just graduated from law school, I’m studying for the bar exam. In the United States, the bar exam is the exam after you graduate from law school that makes or breaks whether you are licensed to practice law in a particular jurisdiction. I am consistently getting anywhere from 50–80% of questions right on multiple-choice questions, depending on the subject, and am frustrated by my inconsistency.

On the first essays I submitted to my bar preparation company’s graders, I scored pretty low and went into panic mode for a bit. In one essay, the grader scored me a 1/6, three tiers below passing. I was warned about this phenomenon — it’s very common to get very low scores, to start, to be incentivized to study more. I didn’t do the best on my first practice test, where I had every subject mixed into one test, and I did get frustrated by my score on this practice test as well, which is not within the passing range yet. I have a little over six weeks to get over this hump, which I’m confident I will, but I’m not sure when things will finally start to “click.”

I am studying anywhere from five to seven hours a day for the bar exam, as per my personalized study plan, and will increase the intensity and duration of my studying very soon. However, there’s nothing that will make me feel better than suddenly waking up tomorrow and scoring 90% of questions right and acing these essays in the eyes of my bar prep company’s graders.

That sudden improvement, unfortunately, is not how the bar exam works, and isn’t how real life works. A lot of the time, improvement also isn’t very linear and can only occur through some substantial setbacks.

There are good days and bad days. I have had very gradual increases in my scores, with better scores in some subjects than others. This, I’ve been told, is natural and will only improve with time, practice, and review. I probably will never get to the point where I get 100% of the questions right like I want to, but the bar exam has taught me some valuable lessons in gradual progress and delayed gratification.

Especially when I was younger, I wanted a lot of instant gratification. This is, of course, very natural for someone who is 10 years old, but trying to expect it as I continued into adulthood was a recipe for disaster. I wanted to become instantly better at running marathons, at school, in every aspect of life, and when I didn’t improve my marathon times instantly, it led to a lot of borderline despair.

But I realized a while ago that a lot of these improvements take a lot of time. It took a lot of time for me to become the marathoner I am now. It took a lot of effort, sustained over a long period of time. Running taught me that, but that realization and following the process as a runner, made me see more with delayed gratification.

I ran my first marathon in 2:40:07. I ran several marathons over the course of a few years, where I did not get better, and my times only got slower. It was only three years later that I ran a faster marathon, and only by 12 seconds. It was three years after that, after several disappointments, where I ran a 2:35:40, a four minute personal best.

I started to break out of instant gratification through realizing that everything has a “suck phase.” The military has a motto called “embrace the suck,” which means to be mentally tough in very difficult situations. My philosophy is that some periods of any long-term endeavor are miserable and make you want to give up.

But embracing it, for me, isn’t always the answer. I keep going, keep pressing, and sometimes stop and then come back another day until it doesn’t suck any longer. Sometimes, the suck phase never ends — I have never mowed the lawn and had it not feel like it sucked. The only satisfaction comes when it’s over.

But few other activities in life are like that. As a runner, the first 15–20 minutes of a run almost always sucks. Most of this is due to my training for the marathon and running 80 miles a week. My body needs a bit more priming and adjustment since it is more fatigued than someone training for the 5k or mile, per se. I don’t know when I will finally feel good during the run — sometimes, I never do, and sometimes I get into “the zone” 30 or 40 minutes into the run.

There is a similar gradual, delayed gratification in my effort to become fluent in Spanish. I have been practicing using lessons on Duolingo, a language acquisition app, for around 570 consecutive days. It isn’t a lot every day — only 5–10 minutes of practice. I wonder if the 5-10 minutes I’ve put into doing Duolingo and language acquisition for the last several years has really paid off or whether I have just wasted my time.

I am reminded that it usually has when there are words I pick up I didn’t know before. I recognize it paid off recently when I can keep up better in conversation with Spanish speakers without pauses, interruption, or Google Translate. I have worked in a school that has many Spanish speaking students, so I do my best to talk to students and translate if students don’t understand what people are saying in English.

However, I wanted to be fluent in Spanish right away, and can sometimes be frustrated when I’m not. I talked to a friend who took a Spanish fluency test with the Spanish Embassy and probably passed. I wished I was in the same place when I compared myself to him. He did give me great suggestions to keep improving my Spanish ability, including watching shows in Spanish with Spanish subtitles on. But it still is going to be a gradual effort where I will need a lot more immersion to be truly comfortable with the language. Since my parents are immigrants, I know lot of people spend their whole lives being comfortable speaking a foreign language.

In all these endeavors, what has helped me be more patient and delay gratification is shifting my focus from outcomes to process. Improving as a runner has been the most trying since it’s always something I have defined a large part of my identity on. I have been trying to shift my focus instead on the amount of effort I put in — if I worked hard, made the right decisions, and tried on a given day, particularly as a runner, that would be the step forward I need to make. As a long distance runner, it took years, if not over a decade, to build to the point where I am now in physiological and mental adaptations as a runner.

One really frustrating thing that happens for me is that I won’t see the improvements and benefits from a really tough cycle of training until months later. I can run 80 miles a week for a month and seem to run the same times in races and workouts. It’ll feel like I’m wasting my time and putting in all this effort for nothing. But three months later, all of a sudden, I’m in much better shape than I was before. That sort of delayed gratification is really tough to deal with in the moment, and tends to only make sense looking back on it later. But it is yet another reminder that improvement takes time, sometimes a lot of it.

On a deeper level, I was really frustrated with my parents’ relationship as a child. For one, I wanted my parents’ marriage to get better after witnessing daily screaming matches between the two of them. I wanted them to suddenly get along the moment I achieved some great accolade in school or got a very good test score on some standardized test. They cared about my education, but they didn’t get along any more or less, no matter what I did, and I didn’t see at the time that their problems revolved around much more than me.

Their marriage never got better. Any time we’re in the same room, I witness how much they still can’t stand each other. There was nothing I could do to change that as the youngest child. When my brother struggled and still struggles with finding his way in life, that did cause some additional strain, where they both blamed each other for their respective parenting methods. I am a big proponent of never giving up and still trying until the end of any given endeavor, but this marriage of constant, tumultuous screaming was one I do wish was given up on much earlier.

There was a lot that went into my parents’ relationship beyond what my brother and I did as kids, and as I got older, those issues were the last thing I wanted for myself and my marriage.

I only realize that now, two years into my marriage myself, that my wife and I deal with a lot of the same problems and just handle conflict in a much more collaborative and healthy way than my parents did. I never saw the stressors of their marriage that they went through that were shielded from me as a kid: child care, credit card bills, the mortgage, division of housework, the input of extended family and friends. I would hear yelling, but not tune out what exactly was being said.

I realize I spent all this time judging and promising I would never be like my parents, only to realize that yes, my marriage could be just like my parents’ if these issues aren’t handled in a healthy way. For a time, my default was to just not acknowledge any disagreements my wife and I had and shy away from the conflict, given my natural reaction to my parents’ form of conflict resolution. But I also learned that that could just lead to building resentment.

My wife and I don’t have kids yet, which could likely be the biggest challenge we face, and may have been the biggest challenge my parents faced. Unlike my parents’ marriage, our relationship has only improved with time as we worked through any issues with communication and disagreements about finances, division of housework, and spending quality time together.

But even there, I sometimes wish there were times where everything suddenly clicks and there were no issues at all, and sometimes, any time my wife and I argue after a week of no conflict, it does feel like a regression instead of a step in the right direction. I am trying to work on perspective and mindset with marriage and relationships as much as I do my other professional or personal pursuits. Like running, the bar exam, or language acquisition, however, a good marriage takes a lot of time and effort.

The bar exam has been the epitome of slow and steady progress, but the pressure for immediate results will always be there. There will always be a part of me that struggles to accept slow, gradual progress.

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But like many of us, it has gotten better as I’ve gotten older. Results take time, and sometimes, results don’t come at all, but there are silver linings from the effort exerted and lessons learned.

Knowing that progress is slow and gradual, most of the time, is easy to say, hard to accept on a daily basis. Personally, I’ve helped deal with this gradual progress by juggling a lot of different tasks. I am forced to not fixate too much on one endeavor or part of my life if progress is not where I want to be. I also have multiple forms of validation, so I can turn to running as a validating part of life if I have frustrations with where I am on my bar exam studying. If none of my more ambitious endeavors are going well, I can focus more on the really important parts of my life, like my marriage, relationships with friends and family, and faith.

But this patience is still something I, like many, am figuring out. And I will keep trying to navigate and figure it out. Ironically, only the passing of time can help build that patience.

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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