A realization I’ve had lately: practically anything that’s great in the world is that way only through constant attention and care—e.g. great products, yards, marriages, companies, friendships. If left alone, practically everything defaults toward mediocrity at best or ruin at worst. “Constant attention and care” always requires time and this is a large part of the challenge—it is costly and limited. Nobody can do this with everything and the bigger the thing is, the more bandwidth it requires. It’s a struggle. However, on the positive side, a state of constant attention and care compounds over time. So the length of time doing this ends up being extremely meaningful. Consider many years of a fertile environment for a product, yard, marriage, company, or friendship. It grows into something that is especially hard to replicate or replace. This is why long-term thinking and decision-making are so powerful, hard, and infrequent. It’s one of the core reasons I love building a company and product over the course of many years and why it’s so challenging yet fulfilling at the same time. I feel the same way about marriage and parenting. In the end, I believe all the difficulty is worth it because creating and sustaining great, enduring, and thriving things is one of the most worthy endeavors in life. In work and in all of life, here’s to selecting those few “constant attention and care” things wisely and to having the commitment and persistence that’s needed to stick with it.