Ravi

Counting also changes behaviour on its own. A week of logging honestly tends to produce more hours the following week.

Hours explain most of it and people badly underestimate their own. Three years of study can be two hundred hours or two thousand, and those are different situations entirely.

Try counting a normal week honestly. Most people who feel stuck at three years are at a few hundred hours total, which is early rather than plateaued. That reframe alone changed how I approached it, because the problem stopped being "my method is wrong" and became "I have not done enough yet".