No matter what there are always times where you feel like you hit a wall. That can be in a project your working on that doesn’t seem to be making progress. You trying to move up in your career. That widget that you are trying to troubleshoot that is always broken. Trying to get healthy and loose some extra weight but the scale keeps lying to you saying the exact same number…There are endless things that progress seems to stall out on. One quote that I have recently heard that is posted in the locker room of the San Antonio Spurs is the following:

When nothing seems to help I go and look at the stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last blow that did it - but all that had gone before - Jacob Riis

We expect life to come in noticeable incremental steps of steady improvement that were able to see. Predictability gives us comfort in being able to say I lost 4 pounds last month so I should lose another 4 pounds this month. What typically happens is we experience bursts of growth and then our results level off even with the same amount of work we put in and it isn't until we put ourselves in a more uncomfortable position that we have that explosive growth again. So remember the stonecutter and keep hammering away at your goal. When you finally break through your goal it won't be because of that one last blow but because you are currently enduring and continuing to put the work in now leading you to that growth.