In games
In games, every level-up is paid for with the time you put in.
At first, leveling is easy. A few minutes and you’re up a level.
But if it stayed that easy, the game wouldn’t be fun. So games make it harder as you go. Monsters get stronger, XP thresholds get higher, and each level takes longer than the last. At high levels, one level might take days, sometimes weeks.
The problem is, most players can’t afford that time. The road to max level is full of boredom, confusion, and frustration. The number of players who quit halfway always outnumbers the ones who reach the top.
So when you see a level-99 player on the road, decked out in glowing gear, you don’t assume they started yesterday. You don’t assume they took a shortcut. You don’t assume they’re a genius.
That level represents the time they put in, and every single moment they wanted to quit but didn’t.
You think, “This player must have invested a lot of time.”
In reality
In real life, though, we expect everything to happen fast.
We see a YouTuber with a million subscribers and assume they blew up overnight. We see a successful founder and assume they found a shortcut. We see a bestselling author and assume they’re naturally gifted.
We only see the level-99 result. We don’t see the climb from 1 to 99.
Why don’t we see it? Because the climb doesn’t get reported. Struggle doesn’t trend. Grinding doesn’t get retweeted. The world only sees the moment of leveling up, then says, “Wow, overnight success.”
Media loves a fast-track story. “Financially free at 25.” “Six-pack in three months.” “First video, a million views.”
These stories aren’t necessarily fake. But they leave out the most important part: time.
Most “overnight success” is years of accumulation.
The person who hit financial freedom at 25 started coding at 12. The one who finished a draft in a week had been blogging for years. The one whose first video went viral had been on social media for five years before that.
And the real-world XP curve is just like a game’s. The further you go, the steeper it gets.
Early progress is fast, which tricks you into thinking you’ll hit level 99 in no time.
But the curve gets steeper. Progress slows down.
In a game, you accept the curve. You keep grinding.
In real life, it should be the same.
Here’s another way to look at it. The level-99 player you see today, their real moment of “success” wasn’t reaching level 99. It was that day, long ago, when they decided to start grinding seriously. Everything after that was just a matter of time.
Level 99 doesn’t happen in a day.
Player notes
Of all the Disney princess movies, Mulan is my favorite.
But Mulan also perfectly captures our obsession with overnight success. Mulan goes from a frail girl who can’t hold a sword to the second-best fighter in the army in under three and a half minutes of montage, set to “I’ll Make a Man Out of You.” The whole movie runs an hour and fifty-five minutes. That training sequence is 3% of it.
Most shounen manga and movies are the same. The protagonists “train hard” for two or three chapters, master a new ultimate move, or just cut to “one year later” and dive into the satisfying payoff: the tournament or the revenge.
We love watching talent and results. We don’t love watching the boring grind. Hit the highlights of the effort, fast-forward through the rest, and please cut out the suffering while you’re at it.
That was my model of effort too. I thought effort was a brief transition phase. Find the right method, put in a little time, and you’d suddenly be strong.
After leaving school and corporate work, I couldn’t sit still long enough to learn anything that took more than 10 hours. Tried something new and didn’t see immediate results? Wrong method. Wrote something and nobody read it? Maybe I should pivot. Every time progress slowed down, my first instinct wasn’t to keep going. It was to look for better tools and better methods.
But no matter how good your methods or gear are, the time still has to be spent.
There’s so much worth learning out there. Video editing, 3D modeling, programming, game development, animation, music, even Excel formulas. The amount of time required to even get started is enough to scare most people off. But every expert you admire was once that same beginner who knew nothing.
Eventually I started seriously studying the people I look up to, asking how long it actually took them to get where they are.
I converted their past experiences and bodies of work into hours, and every number was staggering. But I used to ignore those numbers and only focus on their current achievements. Because I only wanted their results. I didn’t want to walk their path.
If social media displayed hours invested instead of subscriber counts, the world would look very different. The accounts that make you envious wouldn’t say “1M followers.” They’d say “10,000 hours.” Your first reaction wouldn’t be “that’s amazing.” It’d be “that’s a long time.”
So a while back, I finally bit the bullet and locked myself away for 100 hours of learning and shooting to finish my first YouTube video.
I hit a lot of walls. I almost quit again. But I kept telling myself: forget the result, just put the time in.
All I needed was one decision: invest the time.
Once you commit the time, getting better is just a matter of when.
Leveling tips
□ List the people you envy. Seriously study how much time and effort it took them to get where they are. The answer is usually much longer than you thought
□ Don’t rush to judge whether you’ve got what it takes. First count how many hours you’ve actually invested in your target field
□ Slowing progress isn’t stagnation. The curve is just getting steeper. That’s normal. Keep grinding
□ Pick something you’ve always wanted to do but haven’t started. Make yourself one minimum commitment: invest 20 hours and see. Don’t think about results. Just put the time in
□ When you want to quit, tell yourself: you’re in the montage scene of the movie. The real-life montage just doesn’t have a soundtrack, and it runs much longer than the one in the film. Make it through and the reward is on the other side
