Pilgrim

 Your post is so rich - I'm not sure where to start. Perhaps first to say that yes, let us discuss offline a quotidian address 2.0. :)

Your distinction between true progress and experienced progress is an interesting one, and one that rings true to me. If we are progressing, but lack the contextual supports to make us feel we are, is our solution in part a change in mindset? A different way of seeing our lives and world, a new way of counting those markers?

I have been reading Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which I find esoteric in the literal sense: I can't read it intensively, rather I scatter my attention across the page and see what leaps out at me. I suspect I could read it again and notice totally different things. It is a mix of philosophy, religion, Freudian psychoanalysis, and storytelling. Still, it has led me to reflect on enlightenment - what is it? It seems to me a common thread across many conceptions is that the enlightened realize that most of what we pay attention to doesn't matter: only a very few things are really of consequence. Knowing that is one thing: feeling is another, and by that measure I am nowhere near enlightened. It makes me think of the Taoist point (that you no doubt know) that the path that can be spoken is not the path.

Is a feeling of personal progress something that doesn't matter, or something that does? I don't really know: maybe it is something we should accept doesn't matter, and in accepting that find peace? I have more questions than answers this morning, it seems.

On exponential growth. I think my experience would be that in any one domain, my rate of growth slows quickly: fast growth early, but grinding later. Churchill used to refuse to sleep until he had learned one piece of wisdom in a day: that is not at all exponential, but sounds right to me - frankly sounds aspirational. Where I think exponential is possible, though, is in cross-effects. Adding one piece of wisdom to my store is (I hope) not a 1% increase, but I think it makes me better and everything else, too. More wisdom means I am a better husband, better manager, better person. And I think what I learn as a husband or manager has the same cross-spectrum effect. I'm not sure I have that clear in my head, but I wonder if there is exponential growth to be found in that cross effect. Improving at 3 different things provides synergy and growth, with the total growth greater than the sum of its parts. 

Let us talk blog next steps (perhaps this weekend?). And, I'll turn your question back to you in a slightly different form. Are there times or domains in your life when you have felt growth was exponential? If so, when? What distinguished them from other times when it wasn't?