The step you cannot climb

A woman in Kuwait City has been selling handmade children's clothes through messages for two years.

Friends at first, then friends of friends. She learnt slowly and steadily. Better photos. Clearer sizes. A packing method that stopped the parcels arriving creased. Each month a little better than the last, and every improvement could be tried on Tuesday and kept by Thursday.

Then she reaches a point where the slope stops.

The next thing is to sell to strangers. A proper shop page, payment taken in advance, returns from people who do not know her and owe her nothing. None of her two years of small improvements gets her there by itself. There is no smaller version of asking a stranger to pay first. Either she does it or she does not.

We describe getting better as a curve: steep sometimes, but continuous, one step after another. Most of the time it is. But almost every path has a few places where the steps run out. A first hire. A first price rise. The first time we show the work to people who are not being kind.

Those places feel like walls, because we approach them the way we approached everything else, looking for the next small step, and there is not one. The ground simply ends.

What they ask for is different. Not more effort, not more practice. Both feet off the ground at once, for a moment, with no guarantee about the landing.

The mistake is to read the wall as a sign that she has gone the wrong way.

It is the sign that she has arrived at the part where walking stops and jumping starts.