The Work is Working

Many years ago, in what feels like a completely different life, I worked in medical sales. My friends had launched a startup while I was in business school, and it felt like the perfect chance to apply everything I was learning in real time.

It was old-school, traditional sales. No email campaigns, no LinkedIn, no Instagram. Just cold calls and pounding the pavement. I was making fifty to eighty calls a day, traveling one week out of every month, landing in new cities and towns, selling to everyone from small business owners to corporate buyers.

People still picked up the phone back then, but it was a challenge to hold their attention. You leave a message and keep moving, knowing you probably never get a call back. A successful cold call simply meant someone agreed to receive an email. A strong follow-up meant sending a price list. The goal was to move them toward a face-to-face meeting, and if you were lucky, an order. That’s how we measured progress: one small step at a time, one customer at a time. It was slow, incremental, and often discouraging, but it was movement.

And I wasn’t alone. We had a small team doing the work together. We strategized, traded feedback, and gave each other a hard time when someone said something ridiculous on a call. We’d scatter across the country on our sales trips, then come back home to swap stories and lessons learned.

We couldn’t see it then, but something was happening beneath the surface. Every call, every meeting, every small moment of effort was stacking quietly. The work was compounding, not just in sales, but in skill, endurance, and persistence. About a year later, business started to grow rapidly, and it felt like we’d gone from crawling to sprinting overnight.

I think about that period often now as I build this community. Most days, progress feels invisible again. The work happens in silence: reaching out, setting up calls, writing, refining, repeating. In most moments it feels like nothing is landing. But then something small reminds me I’m moving forward, like an unexpected reply, a new introduction, or a conversation that reaffirms the direction.

That’s the thing about growth: it rarely looks like progress while you’re in it. You only recognize it in hindsight.

James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, “The most powerful outcomes are often delayed. You need to be patient long enough to let your habits compound.” That patience is what invisible progress demands, the belief that what you’re doing now is working, even if you can’t yet prove it.

But patience alone isn’t enough. Carol Dweck calls it “adaptive effort” — staying persistent while learning, adjusting, and evolving along the way. It’s not about grinding harder; it’s about learning as you go. Adjusting, listening, staying curious.

I’ve always bristled at the phrase “work smarter, not harder.” It can sound like an excuse to find shortcuts. But in the context of adaptive effort, it makes sense. It’s not just about the numbers game and being on the grind, it’s about making space for reflection and creativity, so your effort compounds in the right direction.

In every path of creation, there’s a long stretch between planting and harvest. You do the work, often without acknowledgement, trusting that something is growing beneath the surface. The roots form even when the soil looks still. Most of life happens underground. What you see above the surface are just the signals.

A few years ago, I attended a book launch for an artist I deeply admire, someone whose large-scale installations appear all over the world. The book was stunning, both visually and in its content. It was a true reflection of years of work and the evolution of his ideas. He told me he’d documented every project in detail from the beginning, not for marketing, but for learning. It became a professional journal that helped him improve with each piece. Only after fifteen years did he realize those drawings, notes, and photos had become a story worth sharing.

That conversation stayed with me. It reframed how I think about invisible progress, not as something that happens to you eventually, but something you are constantly creating. I’ve been documenting my own process with the same intention: to learn from each phase, to see patterns over time, to let my work teach me how to grow.

Everything I’m creating right now as an artist lives within Project Wonder, large-scale art installations I’ve been creating for music festivals since 2018. I’ve documented the process in sketches, photos, and videos. Some are edited and polished, but most are raw, fragments of ideas finding their form. I know it’s building toward something bigger, but I’m not rushing to define my artistry. The more I reflect, the more I see how these invisible chapters are shaping the story I’ll tell later.

Invisible progress feels slow, but it’s steady. It rewards those who keep showing up with open eyes, willing to listen, learn, and adjust. The quiet seasons are where the real work happens, where roots take hold and perspective deepens.

So if it feels like nothing’s happening, try not to lose faith. The work is working, even when you can’t see it. Because when things finally start to move, it won’t feel sudden. It will feel earned.