Erosion as a metaphor for learning

June 18, 2026

I often visualize the process of both writing and learning as erosion-shaped. What I mean is that erosion makes me think of the slow process of water hitting a shore, making small bits of almost unnoticeable progress, punctuated by the occasional substantial structural reconfiguration. This feels structurally a lot like how learning works: waves washing up against a broad seawall of confusion, ignorance and ineffectualness, and then a sudden closing of multiple knowledge or skill gaps when things click into place.

The concept is sort of similar to the idea that “every journey begins with a single step” but I find it a bit more evocative and precise.

The reason I find the erosion framing more evocative is that I rarely perceive learning as a linear process. When, for example, I practice something on the piano, it feels more like I am queueing up a set of experiences for future processing than like a literal step function improvement. This isn’t to say that I don’t see some progress during practice itself, but I often find that the real progress happens either in the background or overnight.

Writing feels very similar to me. In fact, when I wrote Jumping into C++, I spent very little time on the actual writing (sub 200 hours, as I wrote about here). Most of the work happened in the background.

I find this framing useful because it is motivating in the face of confusion and uncertainty in a way that thinking of a linear journey–or even a squiggly line with false starts–is not. Thinking about erosion transforms a sense of pure stasis from demotivating to an appreciation that something unseeable is still happening (you can rarely see meaningful erosion from a single wave, but give it time and you won’t have a house on the shore anymore). This helps address the way that skill plateaus feel so damn demotivating when it feels like “it isn’t working”–instead of expecting every action to have an immediate impact, it’s about some accumulation of incremental actions that eventually lead somewhere.

So the erosion framing pushes me toward taking almost any action related to what I’m working on, with the faith that like water lapping on the coast, something is happening even if it’s not yet visible. All I need to do is take some action to initiate the process.

It encourages me to do things like spend five minutes practicing piano when I walk by, rather than thinking I need to spend a lot of time locking in some gains.

It pushes me to just write some words down when I’m working on an essay, and it makes editing–which is truly a form of sculptive erosion–feel like an equal part of the work. (Arguably it is the work.)