When I lived in Vancouver, rock climbing was my biggest hobby.

​My friends and I would climb outdoors pretty much every weekend, indoors at one of the local gyms two or three times a week, and plan trips to climb in the US a few times a year.

​While it’s now been seven(😭) years since I’ve climbed regularly, there’s one climb that I still think about regularly.

​It was at our local bouldering gym, The Hive.

If you’re not familiar with it, bouldering is a form of climbing based around short routes, no more than 15’ high or so that don’t require ropes or a harness. In an indoor gym, the floor is covered with a thick layer of foam, protecting climbers from the inevitable falls.

​Bouldering routes are typically highly technical and are often referred to as “problems” to be solved. The best problems are as challenging mentally as they are physically.

​There was one such problem that my friend Kevin and I had been working on literally for weeks.

​We’d come to the gym to work on it two or three times every week but could never get more than halfway up.

​Despite the hours we’d spent working on it, we were stumped.

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Developing the Feel

There was one move in particular that we were stuck on.

It required a lunge up and out to a large, round sloping hold you could (supposedly) palm, but not wrap your fingers around to properly grasp.

Between us, Kevin and I had lunged out for this hold hundreds of times.

And hundreds of times our hands had slid from the surface, our momentum then pulling us off the wall and tumbling down to the foamy floor below.

Until one afternoon, something changed.

I made that same lunge I had made countless times before, barely believing at this point that the move was even possible.

But for whatever reason, this time, my hand stuck–albeit precariously–and I was able to maintain my balance, get my feet into position to push me upward, and four moves later I was at the top of the wall.

​Stunned and elated by this breakthrough after dozens of unsuccessful attempts, I jumped down and immediately started up the wall again.

​Once again, I lunged at the sloping hold that had given us so many problems, and once again my hand stuck, and I scampered up the rest of the wall.

​I called Kevin over and scaled it once again.

​After talking through my approach to the move, and a few attempts of his own, Kevin too made it up.

​By the end of the climbing session, each of us had climbed it successfully a half-dozen times in a row.

​Somehow, once we had developed the feel for successfully making what had previously felt like an impossible move, we could repeat that result with ease.

It turns out, the idea of Developing the Feel applies well beyond the world of climbing.

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Developing The Feel In Your Work

It’s easy to look at people who string together success after success and feel like they have some intangible secret sauce that we just don’t have.

We assume it must just be their unique genius, raw talent, decades of dedication to their craft, or maybe even pure luck.

​And sure, all of those things matter.

​But the more likely reason for their success is that they worked hard in obscurity for a long time before achieving an initial breakthrough.

​Once they achieved that first success, however, they developed the feel and it became easier to do it again.

​Over time, creating content, products, and services that resonated with their audience became muscle memory, habit, something they could do in their sleep.

​With the fundamentals rote, they then had the mental bandwidth to experiment further, and the ​returns began to compound​.

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Relax, This Was Always Going To Be the Hard Part

To me, this progression is an encouraging thought.

​It means that even if we have a massive vision for the impact our work will create, we don’t need to worry about the specifics of how to achieve that end goal.

​At least not right now.

​Instead, all we need to focus on is achieving that first breakthrough success.

Because once we’ve done it once, it’s easier to do a second, third, and fourth time, to the point that it becomes our assumed outcome, and our momentum builds.

We can also take solace in the knowledge that that first breakthrough is always going to be the hardest to achieve.

​This is the stage that requires the most grit, perseverance, and continual experimentation.

It’s also the stage with the most doubt, failure, and frustration.

Which is why this is the stage where most people give up, before ever achieving that first success. Before developing the feel for what will work for them and their audience.

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Developing The Feel Requires Persistence

It might take a dozen attempts, it might take a hundred. Maybe more.

​It might require having someone talk us through the moves to help achieve that initial success.

But if we can continue to show up consistently with fresh approaches to the problems we’re facing, eventually, we’ll develop the feel.

And once we do, much of what once felt impossible becomes not only repeatable, but automatic.

​We’ll begin recreating your successes with less time, effort, and frustration. And what had previously taken us years to achieve for the first time will now be our minimum level of expectation for each new project.

​Maybe it’s landing a new client, creating a piece of content that goes viral in our niche, or pulling off a 6-figure product launch.

Whatever your current challenge, achieve it once and the muscle memory will begin to develop.

​Yes, there will still be failure, frustration, and even occasional despair perhaps, but once you’ve developed the feel the balance will begin to tip ever more toward success, ease, and fulfillment.

​If things are hard right now, keep showing up and creating, with the knowledge that you’re just one breakthrough away from changing everything.

​One day, you’re going to swing out for that hold and your hand is going to stick where it had slipped off dozens of times before.

​But until that happens, keep climbing.