This is too true and something that many people (me included at times) don't think about. People feel entitled like you said, and they expect to see their success as something obvious and constantly increasing. But in reality success isn't always a straight line, and sometimes it will seem like you've backtracked. The most important thing is to not get discouraged and keep working towards your final goal though.

I must say that I feel often that I wont ever reach the success I want. I can blame my field (photography... It's a diluted one), and I can blame my skills and camera (when I see those hundreds of thousands of amazing photos online), but these excuses are something that we use just to justify a lack of visible success. But I think that there is much more going on behind the scenes... Maybe my last post got less upvotes than before, but other things happened too. I learnt more about taking photos, I tried something new maybe. But in the end I got more practice, and I think that even if the results are visible initially, they are there in some form.

It's hard to always remember this though. Sometimes it feels like there is no success or improvement at all. So thank you for writing this post! I feel a lot more motivated for today, and I will always try to remember this in the future when something doesn't work as well as I had wished.