On progress (and all the shapes it can take)
A weekly nudge to see your movement from a different angle.
This week, we are inspired by the life lesson of 36-year-old Haresh Vazirani, who shared, “Jumping sideways is progress too, not just moving forward. Give yourself credit for not being stuck.”
If you search for the word progress, most images will show a neat arrow pointing right, a rising graph, or a ladder that goes only upward. A clean, predictable line.
Somewhere along the way, many of us quietly adopted that picture. We started believing progress has to look linear, steady, forward, and ideally fast. But what if the line bends?
What if progress looks more like a circle that brings you back to where you started, but with new eyes?
What if it sounds like one–two–cha–cha–cha, a dance where you move forward, and then backwards, and then sideways, in a rhythm of your own?
Or like the sun tracing its arc across the sky every day — familiar, slow, reliable.
What if it zig-zags, like an ant hauling a breadcrumb ten times its size, taking detours you can’t understand from above?
Or it comes in bursts, like a child building something glorious in a sandbox, destroying it, then starting again.
Or swirls endlessly, like the figure-eight pattern your spoon makes while stirring a pot of pasta sauce as it bubbles to completion.
Progress, when we look closely, wears many shapes. It moves at different speeds, turns around, pauses, loops, retreats, and returns. And often, the only place it doesn’t look straight is real life.
Cha-cha-ing our way through life,
Team FUEL.
P.S. What does progress look like for you? Share it with us in the comments below!
All this linearity creates all kinds of problems for humans. False expectations, misaligned hopes. Maybe we can learn to take more cues from children and animals, as to how to flow more with the zigs and zags, the doodles and the doing, of being