History shows us the importance of being patiently persistent--the ability to work for a long time.
As covered in The Difficult Years, great feats take great amounts of time,
"Joseph Heller spent two to three hours every day for eight years, writing his book Catch-22. It took John Wooden sixteen years to win his first national championship. Stephen King wrote every day for nine years before he ever sold his first novel."
When Bruce Lee was getting settled down in the United States, he'd been doing Kung Fu for years. The sport unlocked something inside of him. A love. A passion. A feeling. It was the thing that he wanted to make his everything.
With a desire to improve his craft and feed that hunger, he opened his own school of Kung Fu and started to teach his own students. It was around this time that he wrote a letter laying out his mission statement for life,
"My aim, therefore, is to establish a first Gung Fu Institute that will spread all over the U.S. (I have set the time limit to 10 to 15 years to complete the whole project.)"
Ten to fifteen years. Bruce was giving himself a decade because he understood the enormity of the project. In essence, he wanted to build an empire. Like the Romans, it wasn't built overnight.
That expectation and understanding is a powerful, even necessary tool, to ensure the success of your ambitions. Difficult things take time. Even when you account for that time, it will probably take longer. It's called Hofstadter's Law--it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.
Remind yourself in your pursuit of how long it will take. The greatest killer of dreams isn't just the difficulty, it's the duration of the difficulty. It's easy to endure a few months of struggle, but can you endure it for a few years? Even a decade? That ability to endure becomes easier when you know you'll have to go through the wringer for a long time.
When you're aware of how long something will take, the duration doesn't work against you, it works for you. Each passing day is a stepping stone toward the mountaintop. A mountaintop that will remain out of reach if you don't consistently remind yourself how much endurance you're going to need.
Give yourself time, and more than you think.
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You can check out the podcast on Bruce Lee to take a deeper dive into his life and greatness
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