Pitfalls

Five ways people trip on their own forest — all avoidable once named.
1. Trying to learn everything. The forest shows all of it, and ambition says take all of it. Resist. Focus is the discipline: three to five skills, moved deeply, beat a dozen touched shallowly — every time, without exception. The forest isn't a to-do list; it's a menu.
2. Skipping roots and prerequisites. The advanced skill glitters; the foundations look like homework. But missing foundations don't vanish — they become walls, and you hit them later with momentum. If chapter 7 had a single law, it's this: the fastest path runs through the prerequisites, never around them.
3. Reading instead of doing. Reading about swimming won't make you a swimmer. Courses, books, and videos are honest ways to reach beginner — and quietly useless beyond it. If your plan for a skill contains no real task, it isn't a plan for growing the skill; it's a plan for feeling informed about it.
4. Comparing yourself to others. Everyone's forest starts somewhere different — different roots, different history, different luck. Their map is not your map; the only comparison the method endorses is you-now against you-last-quarter. (The dates in your tracker exist precisely to win that comparison.)
5. Giving up too early. A level takes a month to three of real work to move — by design. Three weeks in with nothing to show is not failure; it's the middle. The forest was cut so that patience is always rewarded on roughly a monthly rhythm. Trust the cut.
Most of these share one cure: read your own map honestly, monthly, and let it — not mood — decide what's next.