There is a stretch of time in my memory — maybe four or five months, somewhere around the end of my first year with cards — that I can only describe as the blank period. I was practicing almost every night. I was sitting at hotel desks in Graz, in Salzburg, in Vienna, in Linz, running through techniques I had watched on tutorials, working through routines I was building, putting in what felt like serious effort. And nothing was changing.
Not nothing in the dramatic sense. Nothing in the quiet, demoralizing, slow-drip sense. The kind of nothing where you pick up the deck on Monday and it feels exactly the same as it did on Saturday. Where the move you have been working on for three weeks looks, to your own eyes, identical to how it looked at the beginning. Where you record yourself on your phone, watch it back, and see no difference from the recording you made a month ago.
I remember one specific night in a hotel in Innsbruck. I had been working on a particular sequence for about forty minutes. I recorded the last five attempts on my phone, played them back, and then — out of curiosity, or maybe masochism — scrolled back to a recording I had made three weeks earlier. Same sequence. Same angle. Same desk. Same lighting. And the two recordings looked, to my honest assessment, functionally identical.
Three weeks of daily practice. No visible improvement.
That was the night I almost quit.
The Lie of Linear Progress
Here is what nobody tells you when you start learning a skill as an adult. Progress is not linear. Everyone says this, in the abstract, as a platitude. “Oh, progress is not linear.” They nod wisely. But nobody explains what non-linear progress actually feels like from the inside.
What it feels like is this: you are broken. Everyone else is getting better. You are the one person for whom practice does not work. The system, whatever system you are following, works for other people but has somehow failed in your specific case. You are putting in the hours, doing the work, showing up every night, and the universe is simply not holding up its end of the bargain.
That is the emotional experience of a plateau. And the emotional experience is a liar.
What is actually happening during a plateau — the real, neurological, physiological truth of it — is that your brain and body are consolidating. They are building the neural pathways, the muscle memory, the perceptual frameworks that will eventually produce visible improvement. But the building happens below the surface. The foundation is being poured underground, and from above ground, the construction site looks exactly the same as it did yesterday.
I did not know this during my blank period. I did not have the framework to understand that invisible progress is still progress. All I had was the raw experience: effort in, nothing out.
The Consulting Parallel
What saved me, oddly enough, was my day job. In strategy consulting, I had seen the same pattern dozens of times with clients. A company invests in a new initiative — a product development cycle, a market expansion, a process overhaul. For the first six months, the metrics do not move. Revenue is flat. Market share is flat. The CEO starts to panic. The board starts asking questions. The temptation to kill the initiative builds.
And then, in month seven or eight, the metrics jump. Not gradually. They jump. The investment was working the whole time; the results just had a delay. The lag between input and visible output is one of the most common sources of strategic error in business. Companies kill initiatives that were about to work because they cannot tolerate the delay between effort and evidence.
I had explained this pattern to clients many times. I had drawn the graphs. I had shown them the research. And yet when the same pattern showed up in my own practice — effort in, no visible results, the temptation to quit building — I nearly fell for the same trap.
The recognition was humbling. I was the CEO panicking in month six.
What I Did Instead of Quitting
The night in Innsbruck, after comparing those two recordings and seeing no difference, I sat on the edge of the hotel bed for a long time. The cards were still on the desk. My phone was still showing the recordings side by side. And I made a decision that, looking back, might have been the most important decision of my entire journey.
I decided to change what I was measuring.
Until that night, I had been measuring outcomes. How does the move look? How smooth is the sequence? Can I get through the routine without a mistake? These are outcome metrics. They measure what is visible, what is finished, what has already been consolidated into observable skill.
Starting the next morning, I began measuring process. Did I practice? Yes or no. Did I work on the hardest thing first? Yes or no. Did I push past the point of comfort? Yes or no. Did I attempt something I could not yet do? Yes or no.
The shift sounds subtle. It was transformative.
Outcome metrics, during a plateau, always read zero. You practiced for an hour and the outcome looks the same. Demoralizing. Process metrics, during a plateau, can read four out of four. You showed up. You worked on the hard stuff. You pushed yourself. You attempted something new. Perfect score.
The process metrics did not make the plateau disappear. The invisible period continued for weeks after that night. But the process metrics gave me something to anchor to. They gave me evidence that I was doing the right things, even when the right things had not yet produced visible results. They separated my sense of progress from the lagging indicator of observable skill and attached it instead to the leading indicator of deliberate effort.
The Day It Broke
I wish I could tell you the plateau ended in a dramatic moment. A single practice session where everything clicked. A cinematic breakthrough.
It did not happen that way. What happened was more like waking up one morning and realizing that at some point during the night, it stopped raining. You cannot say when the rain stopped. You did not notice the transition. You just know that yesterday it was raining and today it is not.
About six weeks after the Innsbruck night, I was in a hotel in Vienna, running through my routine, and I realized — mid-sequence, without any fanfare — that the move was just… better. Not perfect. But tangibly, unmistakably better than it had been. When had it improved? I have no idea. Some time during the previous six weeks. Some time during the hundred-plus practice sessions where I was measuring process because the outcomes gave me nothing.
The improvement had been accumulating invisibly the entire time. The recordings had been lying to me — not intentionally, but because my eye was not trained enough to see the small, incremental changes that were happening session by session. Each individual improvement was too small to detect. But they had been compounding. And at some point, the compound effect crossed the threshold of visibility.
The Compound Interest Metaphor
I am a strategy consultant. I think in models. And the model that best captures what happened during my blank period is compound interest.
If you invest money at a modest rate of return and check your account daily, you will see almost no change from one day to the next. The daily increments are too small to register. If you checked only weekly, you might notice a tiny bump. Monthly, a small but visible increase. But the real magic of compound interest — the hockey-stick curve that makes long-term investors wealthy — only becomes apparent over years.
Practice works the same way. Each session deposits a tiny, often invisible increment of improvement. A slightly stronger neural pathway. A marginally more efficient muscle firing pattern. A fractionally better perceptual calibration. None of these individual deposits are visible. But they compound. And the compounding curve, like financial compound interest, is exponential. The longer you invest, the faster the returns accelerate.
The problem is that the early part of an exponential curve looks flat. Almost perfectly flat. The first year of compound interest looks like nothing is happening. The first few months of consistent practice look like nothing is happening. And the temptation to quit is strongest precisely during the period when the invisible deposits are building the foundation for the visible breakthrough that is coming.
Every person who quits during a plateau is cashing out their compound interest at the worst possible time.
The Strategies That Kept Me Going
Beyond changing my metrics, I developed several strategies during that blank period that I still use today.
The first was recording not daily but weekly. Instead of comparing tonight’s recording to last night’s, I started comparing this Friday’s recording to last Friday’s. A week is long enough for incremental changes to accumulate past the threshold of detection. Not always. But often enough that the weekly review gave me occasional glimpses of progress that the daily review never could.
The second was tracking difficulty, not success. Instead of asking “Did I perform this move correctly?” I started asking “How hard was this?” If a move that felt impossibly difficult three weeks ago now feels merely hard, that is progress — even if the move still looks rough on camera. Subjective difficulty is a more sensitive indicator of neurological change than observable performance.
The third was finding a single peer. Not a mentor. Not a community. Just one person who was on a similar journey, at a similar stage, who I could share progress with. For me, this was a fellow amateur I had connected with through an online forum. We would send each other weekly recordings. Having someone else watch my progress — someone who was paying close attention because they cared about their own — gave me external eyes that could sometimes detect changes my own eyes were too close to see.
What I Know Now
Looking back, the blank period was not actually blank. It was one of the most productive periods of my entire journey. The foundation that was being built during those invisible months is the foundation I still perform on today. The neural pathways that were being constructed in silence are the pathways that now fire automatically when I step on stage.
The cruel irony of skill acquisition is that the most important work happens when you have the least evidence that it is working. The deposits that matter most are the ones you cannot see. And the decision to continue depositing — to keep showing up, to keep working on the hard stuff, to keep trusting the process when the process gives you nothing in return — is the decision that separates people who eventually break through from people who eventually break off.
I almost quit in Innsbruck. The recordings looked the same. The move felt the same. The plateau felt permanent. And if I had quit, I would never have known that the breakthrough was already building behind the wall of invisible progress, waiting for the compound interest to cross the threshold, waiting for the rain to stop at some unnoticed moment in the night.
The only strategy that truly matters during invisible progress is the simplest one: do not stop depositing. Show up. Do the work. Trust the compound interest. And change what you measure, because the outcome metrics are the last to know.
The process knows first. And the process, if you let it, will carry you through.