There’s a graph that exists in the mind of every person who has ever tried to develop a skill. It looks like a straight line angled upward. Time goes on the horizontal axis. Skill goes on the vertical axis. The more you practice, the better you get, in a smooth, predictable, proportional trajectory.
That graph is a fantasy. It has almost no relationship to how skill development actually works.
Real progress — the kind I’ve experienced in both magic and in every other skill I’ve seriously pursued — looks nothing like a straight line. It looks like a jagged, messy, deeply frustrating series of bursts and stalls and dips and breakthroughs that would make any chart analyst nervous. And understanding this pattern, truly accepting it at a gut level, is one of the most important things you can do for your long-term development.
“Practice Like a Pro” described it directly: progress follows an irregular pattern. Periods of rapid improvement followed by plateaus, sometimes apparent regression, then sudden breakthroughs. This is normal. The adaptation mechanism doesn’t work on a smooth curve. The body adapts in waves.
That last sentence — the body adapts in waves — became something I repeated to myself during every frustrating plateau for the next several years.
The First Plateau That Almost Broke Me
I remember the first real plateau vividly. It was sometime in mid-2017, maybe five or six months into my card magic practice. I’d experienced that intoxicating early phase where improvement was rapid and obvious. Every session felt like a revelation. I could see daily progress. Movements that had been impossible last week were achievable this week. The learning curve was steep, which meant progress was fast, and I assumed this rate would continue indefinitely.
Then it stopped.
Not gradually. It felt like hitting a wall. One week, I was making noticeable improvements in every session. The next week, nothing. I practiced the same amount, with the same focus, on the same material. Nothing changed. The technique I was working on stayed at roughly the same consistency — maybe seventy percent — and no amount of repetition seemed to push it higher.
This went on for two weeks. Then three. Then a month.
I started questioning everything. Was I practicing wrong? Was there a technique issue I wasn’t seeing? Had I hit my natural ceiling? Was I simply not talented enough to go further? The inner narrative turned dark and self-critical in a way that felt disproportionate but was impossible to stop.
What I didn’t understand at the time was that the plateau wasn’t a failure. It was a phase. A necessary, productive phase that felt like stagnation from the inside but was actually the system processing and integrating everything I’d been feeding it during the rapid improvement period.
What’s Actually Happening on the Plateau
The plateau is not a stall. It’s a consolidation phase.
During periods of rapid improvement, the nervous system is building new pathways quickly. It’s roughing in the roads, to use the myelination metaphor from earlier posts. The infrastructure is going up fast, but it’s not fully stabilized. The new pathways work, but they’re fragile. They require conscious attention. They’re not yet integrated with the rest of the system.
The plateau is the period when integration happens. The nervous system takes the new pathways it built during the rapid phase and strengthens them. It wraps myelin around them. It connects them more efficiently to existing pathways. It shifts processing from conscious to automatic. It resolves conflicts between the new patterns and the old ones.
From the outside — from the performer’s subjective experience — nothing seems to be happening. You practice and your performance is roughly the same as yesterday. But internally, the system is doing critical infrastructure work. It’s paving and reinforcing the roads that were roughed in during the burst phase.
This is why breakthroughs so often follow plateaus. The system finishes its consolidation, everything clicks into place, and suddenly you’re at a new level. The improvement feels instantaneous — like something switched overnight — but it was actually the culmination of weeks of invisible internal processing.
Understanding this changed my relationship with plateaus from adversarial to patient. The plateau wasn’t something to fight. It was something to trust.
The Regression That Isn’t
Even more unsettling than the plateau is the apparent regression. There are periods in skill development when you genuinely seem to get worse. A technique that was working at seventy percent consistency drops to fifty. A sequence that felt natural starts feeling awkward. Your performance today is measurably worse than your performance last week.
This happened to me often enough that I started to dread it. I’d be working on something, making steady progress, and then one day it would all fall apart. Not just stall, but actively decline. And the decline would persist for days, sometimes a week or more.
The “Art of Practice” framework explained this too, and the explanation made such perfect sense that I felt foolish for ever panicking about it.
Apparent regression often occurs when the nervous system is reorganizing. The old motor patterns aren’t quite right for the level of performance you’re approaching, but the new patterns aren’t fully established yet. You’re in a transition zone where the old way doesn’t work anymore and the new way doesn’t work yet.
Think of it like renovating a room while you’re still living in it. There’s a period during the renovation when the room is less functional than it was before you started. The old furniture is gone but the new furniture hasn’t arrived. The walls are stripped but not repainted. It’s worse than the original, and it’s worse than the final result will be. But it’s a necessary phase in getting from one to the other.
In skill terms, the system is dismantling an approach that has reached its limit and building a more sophisticated approach to replace it. During the transition, performance dips because neither approach is fully operational. But the dip is temporary, and the level you reach after the reorganization is higher than the level you would have reached by continuing to optimize the old approach.
The regression isn’t regression. It’s renovation.
The Consulting Parallel
I saw this identical pattern in my consulting work, which helped me trust it in my practice even when it felt terrible.
Every significant consulting project goes through a phase that feels like things are getting worse before they get better. You’ve done the analysis, you’ve identified the problems, you’ve begun implementing changes — and for a period, the client’s operations are messier than they were before you started. Old processes have been disrupted but new ones aren’t fully functional. People are confused by the changes. Metrics dip.
New consultants panic during this phase. Experienced ones know it’s coming and prepare the client for it. “Things will get temporarily worse before they get permanently better. That’s not a sign the changes are wrong. It’s a sign the transition is happening.”
The same is true in skill development. The dip isn’t a sign your practice is wrong. It’s a sign your system is transitioning to a more capable architecture. The old approach had a ceiling. The new approach, once consolidated, will take you past that ceiling. But the transition between them is messy and temporarily painful.
Learning to recognize this pattern — and to hold steady through it rather than panicking and reverting to the old approach — is one of the most valuable skills in practice.
The Wave Pattern
Once I understood that progress comes in bursts, plateaus, and occasional dips, I started mapping my own development more honestly.
The pattern, looking back over months and years, is remarkably consistent. A burst of rapid improvement lasting one to three weeks, during which I feel like a genius and everything is clicking. A plateau lasting two to six weeks, during which nothing seems to change and I question my methods. Sometimes a dip lasting a few days to a week, during which I seem to get worse and I question my talent. Then another burst, carrying me to a level higher than the previous burst reached.
Burst. Plateau. Sometimes dip. Burst. Plateau. Sometimes dip. Burst.
The overall trajectory is clearly upward. Each burst takes me higher than the last. But the path between bursts is flat or occasionally downward. If you zoom in on any single week, you might see stagnation or decline. If you zoom out to months or years, you see steady, unmistakable improvement.
The problem is that we live at the zoom-in level. We experience practice session by session, day by day, week by week. And at that resolution, the plateau looks like failure and the dip looks like disaster. You need the long view to see the pattern, but the long view isn’t available in the moment.
This is where journaling and tracking become essential tools, not as productivity fetishes but as reality checks. When I’m three weeks into a plateau and feeling like I’ve wasted my time, I can look back at my notes from three months ago and see where I was then versus where I am now. The progress is obvious in the long-term data even when it’s invisible in the daily experience.
Why Non-Linear Progress Is Actually Good News
Here’s the part I promised in the title. Why is non-linear progress good news?
Because it means the plateaus and dips are not signs of failure. They’re signs of a healthy system doing what healthy systems do: processing, integrating, reorganizing, building infrastructure. If progress were perfectly linear, it would mean the system was never doing any of that deeper work. It would mean you were only ever adding superficial capacity without ever consolidating it into durable skill.
The plateau is the brain’s processing phase. It means the system received the signals from your focused practice and is doing the heavy lifting of integration. If you never hit plateaus, it would mean the signals weren’t strong enough to trigger deep processing. The plateau is evidence that your practice is working at a level deep enough to require significant processing time.
The dip is the brain’s renovation phase. It means the system has identified that its current architecture needs upgrading and is doing the work of transitioning. If you never hit dips, it would mean you were only ever optimizing within your current architecture, never building a more capable one. The dip is evidence that your system is breaking through to a fundamentally higher level of organization.
This reframing changes everything. The plateau isn’t a wall. It’s a cocoon. The dip isn’t a collapse. It’s a renovation. And the burst that follows isn’t random luck. It’s the payoff from weeks of invisible internal work.
How to Survive the Flat Periods
Knowing this intellectually is valuable. Living it emotionally is something else entirely. When you’re three weeks into a plateau, the fact that it’s a “processing phase” provides limited comfort against the visceral feeling that you’re wasting your time.
Here’s what I’ve found helps.
Keep practicing at the same intensity. The biggest mistake you can make on a plateau is to either give up or drop back to easier material out of frustration. The plateau is the processing phase for the work you’ve been doing. Continuing that work feeds the process more material. Backing off starves it.
Track something other than the stalled metric. When my success rate on a particular technique plateaus, I shift my tracking attention to other aspects — smoothness, naturalness, recovery speed from errors, consistency under distraction. Often these secondary metrics are improving even when the primary one is flat. The system is working on the problem from angles I wasn’t measuring.
Trust the pattern. If you’ve experienced the burst-plateau-burst cycle before, remind yourself that the current plateau is the same as the previous ones, which all ended in breakthroughs. The pattern has never permanently stalled before. There’s no rational reason to believe it will this time.
Set a time horizon. I give myself a rule: no fundamental changes to my practice approach during a plateau shorter than six weeks. If I’m genuinely stalled for six weeks or more, I’ll re-evaluate. But most plateaus resolve on their own within four weeks if I keep doing the work. The six-week rule prevents me from panicking and making impulsive changes that disrupt a process that was working fine.
And honestly? Sometimes the best thing you can do during a plateau is take a day off. The processing happens during rest. If you’ve been hammering the practice without adequate recovery, the system might be behind on consolidation. A rest day can be the thing that lets the breakthrough happen.
The Long View
After several years of tracking my own development, the non-linear pattern has become something I not only accept but genuinely appreciate.
The bursts are exhilarating. They’re the reward for the patience of the plateaus and the discomfort of the dips. They feel like everything clicks at once, because it does — the integration work is complete, the new architecture is online, and suddenly you can do things that seemed impossible three weeks ago.
The plateaus are peaceful, once you trust them. They’re the periods where you can relax into the practice without the pressure of visible improvement. You’re doing the work. The system is processing. It will resolve when it resolves.
The dips are still uncomfortable. I won’t pretend otherwise. Even understanding the mechanism, it’s hard to watch your performance decline and trust that it’s temporary. But each dip I’ve survived has ended in a higher peak, and that track record builds its own kind of faith.
Progress is not linear. It was never going to be. And the irregular path — the messy, frustrating, deeply human path of bursts and stalls and setbacks and breakthroughs — is the path that leads to genuine, durable skill.
The straight line is a fantasy. The wave is real.
And the wave goes up.