We live in an age that worships linear ascent.
Open social media, and the algorithm feeds you timelines of “zero to half marathon in three months,” wealth trajectories of “tripled my salary in one year,” and step-by-step guides that promise to take you from novice to expert in record time. In the stories generated by AI, success is always a clean, upward-sloping line—low at the start, high at the end, with perhaps one or two symbolic setbacks that are casually brushed aside.
This is the narrative the algorithm loves. It is clean, satisfying, and easy to share. It tells us that if we just find the right method, persistence will deliver linear returns.
But anyone who has truly lived knows—reality does not work that way.
In the world of climbing, there is a training tool called the hangboard. It does not lie. And the first lesson it taught me is this: persistence is never a straight line. It twists and turns. It takes two steps forward and one step back. It brings you to the brink of a breakthrough, then yanks you back to the starting line.
Straight Lines Are the Logic of Machines; Winding Paths Are the Essence of Life
Artificial intelligence thinks in straight lines. Feed it enough data, and it can optimize itself along a predictable trajectory. The more it trains, the better it performs; the more parameters it has, the more capable it becomes. This is a nearly perfect upward curve.
But the human body is not a model. Tendons are not parameters.
When you first start hangboarding, the initial weeks often bring rapid progress. You go from hanging ten seconds to fifteen seconds, then to adding weight. You think to yourself: at this rate, won’t I be doing one-finger pull-ups in three months?
Then you get injured. Or, more commonly—you suddenly regress. The same edge, the same weight; yesterday you held it with ease, today you can’t manage two seconds. There is no reason, no warning. An AI would not understand this, but your body does.
This is the first truth of the hangboard: progress is not accumulation; it is oscillation.
Your nervous system needs to recover. Your connective tissue moves much slower than muscle. Your hormonal cycles, your sleep quality, even your mood on any given day—all of these send your performance on a rollercoaster ride. What you can do today, you may not be able to do tomorrow. It is frustrating. But it is also the most honest thing about it.
Letting Go of the Linear Narrative Lets You Go Further
Why do so many people start working out, learning a language, practicing an instrument, and then give up so quickly?
Because they carry a “straight line” in their minds. They believe that if they persist, they should always be moving upward. The moment they hit a plateau, a regression, or a cycle of setbacks, they feel they have “failed” or that they “lack talent.”
But those who truly endure have quietly switched scripts. They no longer believe in the straight line. Instead, they embrace a winding path—one where sometimes you are climbing, sometimes you are circling around, and sometimes you have to retreat to the valley and find a new way up.
hangboard training is a microcosm of this script.
You might spend three months increasing your added weight from ten kilograms to twenty. Then one morning you wake up, and your fingers ache. You have to strip off all the weight, return to bodyweight hangs, even go back to the deepest, twenty-millimeter edge, and start over. An outsider would see this as “regression.” But you know what you are doing: you are giving your tendons time. You are repairing those invisible micro-injuries. You are laying the foundation for the next ascent.
Persistence is not about moving forward at all times. It is about being willing to stop, to step back, to take the detour when necessary—while never leaving the path.
What AI Does Not Know: The Detours Are Where the Real Growth Happens
AI learns along an optimized path. It can avoid all known mistakes and take the shortest route to a goal. But human beings do not grow that way.
Our detours are not bugs—they are features.
Those small injuries that set you back teach you to listen to your body’s signals. Those plateau phases you thought would never end force you to re-examine your weaknesses in technique. Those months you thought were “wasted” are quietly reshaping your connective tissue—it is far slower than muscle, but once built, it lasts far longer.
Every failure on the climbing hangboard reveals a truth about yourself. Where are your weaknesses? How well do you recover? Is your breath steady under pressure? No AI can perceive these things for you. You have to experience them firsthand, reflect on them yourself, and make adjustments on your own.
Success is not a line you draw in advance. It is a path you discover as you walk it, course-correcting as you go.
How to Make Peace with the Winding Road
If you are engaged in something that requires long-term persistence—whether it is climbing, starting a business, writing, or mastering any skill—the climbing hangboard has offered me a few lessons worth keeping:
First, accept oscillation. What you cannot do today does not mean you will never do it. Zoom out to months, to years—that is where the real trend reveals itself.
Second, protect your foundation. Before chasing breakthroughs, make sure your foundation is healthy. Sometimes “stepping back” is not failure, but a strategic pause. It is better to ease off than to push until injury forces you to stop.
Third, redefine persistence. Persistence is not about improving every single day. It is about showing up when you are at a low point. It is about believing when you are regressing. It is about being willing to place your hands on the board, take a deep breath, and hang again—even when you cannot see the end.
Fourth, trust time, but do not let it control you. AI can tell you that “on average it takes six months,” but your body keeps its own calendar. Some progress quickly, some slowly; it has nothing to do with whether you are “trying hard enough.” Comparison only breeds anxiety, and anxiety is the greatest enemy of persistence.
Conclusion
We live in an era being reshaped by AI. Efficiency, optimization, linear ascent—these words are shaping our imagination of what success looks like. But the climbing hangboard reminds us: there are some things that will always belong to the human realm.
Persistence is never about moving upward along a perfectly straight line. It is a winding road. You will lose your way. You will take the long route. You will return to where you started. You will doubt yourself when the summit remains out of sight.
But you keep walking. You keep hanging. Every time you let go, you place your hands back on the board.
That is what success truly looks like. It is not a beautiful straight line. It is the winding, twisting, utterly unique path that you walk with your own hands.