NOT SEEING visible progress is frustrating. When you work toward a goal but fail to see tangible results, you might feel inclined to quit. Why continue dedicating your time to something that doesn’t seem to be making a meaningful difference in your life?
These are some of the thoughts that cross your mind prior to falling off the wagon.
The truth about achieving massive success is that it takes a long time. As the saying goes, “Rome wasn’t built in a day.” Neither are good habits or systems that lead to success.
You might be making tiny changes for years before they pay off, but just because progress is invisible doesn’t mean it is not there; The effects of good habits remain unnoticeable until their weight becomes significant enough to tip the scale. This phenomenon is called the Plateau of Latent Potential—A concept from the New York Times bestselling book Atomic Habits.
In this article, I explain why crossing the plateau is essential for success, and why you must be aware of it as you continue on your journey. It doesn’t matter if you’re building a new habit or are working toward a big goal. The results of your previous actions are almost always delayed.
Key Takeaways
- The Plateau of Latent Potential is the lag time between what you think should happen and what actually happens.
- The cumulative efforts of a small habit will eventually tip the scale. You just need to hold on long enough.
- You should be more concerned with your current trajectory than your current results.
The Moment You Tip the Scale
There is a gap between the results you expect and the results you actually see.
Read every day for a month and you’re still not a genius. Go to the gym for a few weeks and you are still not in good shape. The results of small changes often don’t show for months or years but we expect an immediate outcome.
I had a similar experience when I first started writing on this website. I made it a habit to publish two pieces of content every week, one blog like the one you are reading now and a newsletter. During the first few weeks of writing, I thought, “People will be all over this in just a few months.” Well, I was wrong.
Little Choices Add Up in the Long Run
It took much longer before my website was getting consistent website traffic and my newsletter had a loyal readership. Today, my content is attracting tens-of-thousands of readers from all over the world. The message I share is one of inspiration: I help entrepreneurs and business owners find the success they deserve. I consider it my job to study successful entrepreneurs and business owners and share with you the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and habits that propelled them toward incredible achievement.
What I learned from working on MikevanderPoel.com is that you can’t expect to achieve remarkable results after just a few small steps. You must put in consistent effort, day in and day out, and believe in the fact that you are accumulating small but meaningful changes in the background. Put differently, you must have faith that doing the right thing repeatedly will lead to a major change down the road.
We don’t notice the effects of small habits until we tip the scale and break through what’s called the Plateau of Latent Potential.
What is the Plateau of Latent Potential?
The Plateau of Latent Potential is the lag time between what you think should happen and what actually happens.
Progress doesn’t happen in a linear fashion because the results of your efforts are often delayed. When you do something good for yourself, you typically don’t see the kind of feedback you expect. It isn’t until months or years later that you the value of the previous work you have done.
When you are not seeing the desired result fast enough, you will find yourself in what’s called the valley of disappointment. Here are some examples:
- You’ve been trying to grow your social media following, but after having posted every day for one year straight, you still haven’t achieved your goal of 1,000 followers.
- You’ve been studying habit formation and have been trying to build better habits, but after putting in consistent work for a month, it still takes a lot of conscious effort to follow through with your habit.
- You’ve been investing money after talking to a financial advisor, but after putting aside 10% of every payment for your investments, you still haven’t reached your savings goal.
- You’ve been following your weight loss program every day for a period of time, but the product of your daily habits hasn’t paid off yet.
You feel discouraged after putting in lots of hard work without seeing any results. Perhaps you’ve been building habits following the habit loop as outlined in Atomic Habits, or you’ve been doing the implementation intention technique where you practice a new behavior at a specific time.
It’s important to realize that work is not wasted but that it is simply being stored and waiting to be revealed at a later date. For me, the habit of typing up a few words every week didn’t pay off for many months. I didn’t get to enjoy the fruits of my labour until I had written and published over 100,000 words, or the equivalent of two standard size books.
This phenomenon is not just observed in also observed in nature. As James Clear says, “It is the human equivalent of geological pressure. Two tectonic plates can grind against one another for millions of years, the tension slowly building all the while. Then, one day, they rub each other once again, in the same fashion they have for ages, but this time the tension is too great. An earthquake erupts. Change can take years—before it happens all at once.”
How Do You Know You Crossed The Plateau of Latent Potential?
Once you hit the Plateau of Latent Potential, people might call you an overnight success. That’s how you know you finally tipped the scale.
This is something that I often witness in my work with entrepreneurs. Some of the hardest-working people that I’ve had the pleasure of working with told me that their breakthrough moments made them look lucky. These people are committed to continuous improvement, breaking bad habits and building good ones, and focused on becoming the type of person they’ve always wanted to be. Yet, because their success unfolded in a dramatic fashion (i.e., they broke through the plateau), it looks like they became successful very quickly.
What Happens Behind the Curtains
It’s normal to only see the most dramatic event and not all the hard work that preceded it.
We could be dealing with the hardest-working person on the planet, someone who has taught themself how to make better daily choices over and over again, but because we don’t know how much work they put in, we reach the conclusion that they’re lucky.
The truth is that the average person only sees the result and not the process.
Because it is difficult for an outsider to see the amount of work you put toward achieving a goal, it can be easy for them to think that you have natural aptitude or skill. Perhaps they believe that you were born with some special talent.
People don’t realize is that a successful person was once an unsuccessful person. What separated them from the crowd is the fact that they put in consistent work on a daily basis until they crossed the Plateau of Latent Potential. At its core, success is the product of small daily habits.