If there’s one thing that is permanently etched into my identity, my name, and who I was, it is my (former) association to Tetris. While not the love of my life anymore, I’m still quite fond of Tetris and play it from time to time. For a period of my life where Tetris was my primary interest, I would spend upwards of 5-10 hours per day playing the game, particularly the standardized assessment of one’s Tetris skill–how fast one is able to clear 40 lines, typically on the fanmade platform Jstris, which removes any delay barrier and allows for maximum customization of one’s keybindings, such as the autorepeat rate (ARR: how fast a keystroke repeats when held down), and delay autoshift (DAS: the delay between a keystroke and when it starts to repeat). Only completed and unaborted runs would get logged in one’s profile. Perhaps bad Tetris practice, but I had aborted over 99% of my runs, opting to restart a poor run as opposed to completing a run I knew would not beat my personal best (PB). Records run from as far back as February of 2017 to the present date, as I would occasionally return to see if I would be able to beat my PB after some break.

As you can see from the progress chart—my personal best hasn’t been beaten since February 28, 2018, with a handful of scattered completed runs after that date–post Tetris breakup. There was this sense that I had stagnated for years, and that my Tetris skills would never return to what they used to be, as for years I always hovered around 60-65 seconds on every run (amounting to 1.7 pieces per second laid, as opposed to the 2.1 pieces–do note that PPS and PB are inversely related), and appeared to flatline around that time, as I no longer had the time or intention to grind my score back down to the sub 47.81 seconds necessary to beat my personal best. It wasn’t until a recent run, after over a year of failing to complete a run, did I really care to check the other KPIs measured with every game. I had always paid attention to “Blocks Used” (a perfect run being 100 blocks, with the average run being closer to 101-104) and the actual “Time” metric–but there was one metric I had long been neglecting for years, the “Finesse.” Finesse is extraneous keystrokes that were not necessary in order to place a block in a certain location, i.e. if one configures their DAS and ARR right, and uses precisely the right amount of rotations and keypresses, one should theoretically achieve a finesse of 0, a perfect run.

It was at that point I had realized I had not been stagnating. At the peak of my Tetris fascination, I was averaging finesses of around 130 extraneous keystrokes. It was not something I consciously thought to improve, especially since I had a tendency to rotate in a singular direction, instead of both (resulting in three keystrokes where I could’ve used one, in 270 degree rotations). It was not a value I had learned to pay attention to, especially not after I stopped seriously grinding for my personal best. Yet, upon my recent game achieving a very average 61 second run, I was about to sigh another sense of defeat when I noticed an unusually decent number–a finesse of 60, the lowest finesse I had ever achieved. As I went back on my progress chart, I noticed a trend–from a finesse of 130, I went to a finesse of 100, then 90, then 80, 70, and finally 60, a slow but certain progress I had failed to notice for over six years. Hardly playing Tetris–playing less in the last six years than I would in a single day in my heyday–I had managed to make my keystrokes over twice as efficient, without even consciously realizing it–past making an effort to use two rotations over one, leading to that initial jump from 130 to 100.

While I played this last round, thoughts flit through my mind about how if I somehow beat my PB, how I could spin its tale in an inspirational manner for LinkedIn, about the value of stepping away and returning before achieving success. Instead, I was taught an incredibly valuable lesson on the progress we don’t see or notice, because we’re so myopic on one or two KPIs that we fail to see our progress across other axes. We begin to believe we’re stagnating and not improving, because we’re not noticing the improvement hiding in the background–or in this case, hidden in plain sight, in data I never thought to analyze. What I initially assumed to be a failure of improvement in my Tetris skills was because I was so focused on maximizing my speed, I forgot to even check if I’ve improved my efficiency–which will ultimately prove far more valuable in the long run should I decide to return to improving my PB. I was improving–I was certainly not stagnating, and even spread out across over five years, I made slow but steady progress, as my finesse improved by about ten keystrokes every year, without even being consciously aware of my progress.

It is these hidden forms of progress that, when not acknowledged, makes us feel stuck and dejected, as though we aren’t improving, or that our practice isn’t paying off. Not all of us have the liberty of seeing these hidden progresses literally written in pure data in an easily accessible format, but these data-driven metrics of those hidden progresses highlight that which haven’t been or can’t be measured, and that slow but steady improvement in ways and axes we never really thought to measure.

We are often taught that success is defined by a specific set of metrics–a set of societal KPIs that supposedly measure our progress and skill, when there exist far more metrics to check than those expected ones. When success is societally defined by a specific metric, we neglect to see all the other ways we are improving, across all the other metrics that could be measured. Success is far more than those KPIs society deems markers of success–how many degrees you own, how much you make, or how many followers you accumulated. True success comes from understanding the aggregation of all KPIs, and seeing the progress one has made, despite the lack of success in Superstar KPIs.

Perhaps I have had quite a nontraditional route in my career, failing to obtain my Bachelor’s Degree or holding a steady job (due to the gap between my skills and experience/qualifications making it difficult for me to obtain a job that matches my skillset), but I have grown steadily in many other ways: spiritually, psychologically, socially, and intellectually, in ways that data-driven metrics cannot quantify. Growth and progress are not always about the progress we do see–but are largely the progress we don’t see. Sometimes it isn’t until we take a step back and look at how far we’ve actually come do we realize how much progress we’re actually making.

If you spend all day watching your plant and expecting it to grow in front of you, you’re going to get bored very quickly. But by slowly but surely watering the plant every day, tending to it, and nurturing it, a beautiful lush verdance will bloom before you. Progress takes time, and while in some fields you may grow like rhubarb–so fast you can hear it grow, in others, growth is like a bonsai tree–imperceptible, but certain. Growth can occur in many different ways, and awareness of this helps one realize one is truly not stagnating–just growing in ways they didn’t really think they were growing in.

Having a growth mindset is not just about spotting growth on standard KPIs, but growth among those KPIs one didn’t think to measure. When one is aware of their growth, one realizes stagnation is not really a thing that happens. So if you find yourself stagnated, ask yourself if there’s areas you never thought to check if you were growing in. You may be surprised to see a garden in the nook you forgot to check.