The Long Game

As Aikido master George Leonard notes, “In the land of the quick fix it may seem radical, but to learn anything significant, to make any lasting change in yourself, you must be willing to spend most of your time on the plateau, to keep practicing even when it seems you are getting nowhere.”

There’s a great quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow that goes something like: we measure ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others measure us based on what we’ve done. This makes sense, of course. But it’s awfully frustrating when there’s a gap between what we know we can accomplish and what we’ve done up to that point.

it’s important to ask yourself: in a year’s time, if I didn’t do this, how would I feel?

We’re stuck in permanent “execution mode,” without a moment to take stock or ask questions about what we really want from life.

If it were easy to be patient, and easy to do the work, then everyone would do it. What I’ve come to love about patience is that, ultimately, it’s the truest test of merit: Are you willing to do the work, despite no guaranteed outcome?

Jeff Bezos, in his 2018 letter to Amazon shareholders, tells an unusual story about handstands. “A close friend recently decided to learn to do a perfect free-standing handstand,” he recounted.4 She took a handstand workshop at a yoga studio, but wasn’t progressing as fast as she wanted, so she hired—yes!—a handstand coach. Bezos recounts what the

“The average person has mountains of inefficiency in their day, things that they put up with and they don’t even realize it, because they’ve given themselves permission to work as long as it takes,” he says. “When you give yourself permission to work long hours, to work continuously, you allow these little systemic, strategic inefficiencies to crop

Decide what to be bad at. You can’t do it all. In order to be great at something, accept that you’ll be terrible at something else. Refusing to make that choice leads to mediocrity.

I’ve come to understand what few recognize: the rate of payoff for persevering during those dark days isn’t linear. It’s exponential.