What if we were wrong about the phrase “One step forward, two steps back?” Something I came across on Instagram:

“Two steps back can still be two steps in the right direction.”

That was kind of mindblowing. And seems to more accurately reframes what progress intuitively looks like in reality. Because I was brought up on the narrative that progress looks like a straight line, a series of steps that just goes up and up. But what if I was wrong? What if we were all wrong about progress?

What if progress was less about improvement on a hard metric but more to do with calibrating the right direction to improve in? It makes me think about iterative cycles of design, how version 1 can sometimes be better than version 2, only to break through both past versions in version 3. Perhaps then, that taking the two steps back is a necessary process of recalibrating your direction, so that you don’t get somewhere fast but end up in the wrong destination. It’s pretty counterintuitive, because I’m so used to thinking in linear, machine-like progress. But organic progress out in the real world looks more like the “two steps back” approach. And it’s so easy to get discouraged due to not seeing linear daily/weekly/monthly hard progress, when all my efforts were in fact to prepare, experiment and explore the right direction to take. It’s progress alright. So to rephrase the original saying:

One step forward to learn if it’s the right direction, two steps back in the right direction.