Plateaus are where your skills catch up to your ambition.

Plateaus feel like failure because the graph goes flat while the effort stays high. What is usually happening underneath is consolidation, with the things you learned quickly settling into something reliable, and reliability does not show up as a new number. Ambition sprints ahead early, and there is always a stretch where the skill has to walk over and meet it.

When the numbers stop moving, change what you measure instead of how hard you push. Consistency, technique, how you feel at the end. Then keep going, because most people quit exactly here.