On her first day of college, Rachel wakes up with a superpower: She can write a plan for the day, and she will always follow it. She won’t open Instagram even once.
She spends that first day asking Claude for strategies to become successful. On the second day, she reads How to Win Friends and Influence People. By the end of the week, she’s on good terms with most of her professors, and she’s caught the eye of a sophomore whose father runs a Fortune 500 company.
Grindset fantasy
In a standard progression fantasy, the protagonist is a weak-to-normal denizen of a magical world who becomes one of the most powerful people in history.
It’s a rising genre: Solo Leveling crushed the 2025 Anime Awards and might be the most popular manhwa, and Dungeon Crawler Carl is currently #7 on the Amazon charts.
Protagonists advance by having a broken magical ability or secret knowledge. But most of them also have a second ability, which typically goes unremarked: something I’ll call “perfect willpower”. They don’t get tired or distracted. They don’t get lost in a good book. They just grind.
But never mind the fantasy
Progression realism (PR) removes the magic and leaves the perfect willpower. Our hero is just like us — sans akrasia. They plan ahead, follow through, and never procrastinate.
Perfect willpower interests me because in theory, we could all have it. Most of us can’t run a four-minute mile with any amount of training, but there is no physical law that stops me from getting up tomorrow, carefully writing out my priorities, and then working on them in order of importance until I fall asleep.
Regardless, I’ve never had one of those days. Even the most productive, driven people on the planet don’t reliably have those days. Something always trips them up — impulsiveness, addiction, unresolved character flaws. Elon Musk used ketamine. Angela Merkel was too reactive. Genghis Khan wasn’t a long-term thinker. And Lyndon Baines Johnson…
…actually, LBJ is basically a PR protagonist. He spent forty years leveraging his friends and responsibilities to seize increasing amounts of power, with insane focus throughout. A fellow politician once said: “I never knew a man could work that hard.” Robert Caro’s The Path to Power might be the first work of progression realism.
At the end of her first semester, Rachel’s grades are perfect. Her boyfriend is head over heels, and she doesn’t plan to leave him for a while — but if she did, his father would still hire her. She’s reading a lot of books (and detailed outlines, courtesy of Claude). Her memory isn’t great, but she’s using spaced repetition to develop a mental map of useful concepts — mostly finance and marketing, with enough science to sound smart and distinguish experts from charlatans.
She sprints and swings a kettlebell twice a week. She has a beautiful personal website and a growing Substack audience. The books make it easy to find ideas, and readers love the way she blends time-tested insights with quirky stories from college life. Some of the stories are even true.
She’s made arrangements to intern for her local representative next semester: some things need to be learned up close, and she plans to win some friends along the way.
Would this actually be good?
In theory, PR combines three successful genres: progression fantasy, self-help, and biographies of successful people. Caro’s books are bestsellers, and non-historical progression realism lets you do the same thing much faster by making things up.
I don’t see why someone couldn’t write an interesting book (or endless webfiction saga) about a normal person grinding their way to world domination one good day at a time. I’d read it!
The canonical way to do this thing I just invented
I’d suggest the following “rules” for the genre. Like any rules, you can break them, but that shouldn’t be the default.
- Big dreams. You could write PR for almost any goal, but the fun part (for me) is thinking about how someone would optimize for something big: influence, money, fame.
- No second superpower. The protagonist should be smart enough to learn most things, but they shouldn’t be the smartest person in the story. Likewise, don’t make them supermodel gorgeous or the heir to a vast fortune. It’s more fun to see them acquire knowledge, beauty, and wealth using willpower!
- Realistic rivals. The worst progression fantasy takes a Very Special protagonist and surrounds them with bumbling idiots to make them even specialer. As a PR protagonist rises to prominence, they should interact with other prominent people, and those people should have enough talent not to get steamrolled. This is the time to pull out supermodels and geniuses — or maybe someone else with the same superpower.
Rachel graduates one year early. Her friends are sad to lose her, but they know she’ll keep in touch; Rachel is incredible at keeping in touch. Her local representative compares her to a young Hillary Clinton, and Rachel knows she’ll have a big endorsement when she makes her first run at local office.
But first, she needs to build a war chest. Her Y Combinator pitch is next week. It’s fine that she never picked up much programming; she has Claude Code and three of the sharpest young engineers on the Eastern seaboard (who compare her to Sam Altman, “but not evil”).
People say the future will be hard for humans, but those people haven’t met Rachel. Yet.