Patience to persevere

Page 82. Patience to persevere. Every effort makes a difference. We have an immense aversion to pain and effort. Rabbi Wineberg told me that when he was a boy, his teacher would always say to him, “, Noah, your challenge in life is not that you don’t want to be great. You want to be great. You just want it to happen in one day and on that day, you want to sleep!”

— from The Relationship With Yourself (Traits/Reflection) · 7 Traits, How to Change Your World

In the book

The single best predictor researchers found for who would make it through the hardest training was not talent or physical strength but grit: perseverance and passion for long-term goals. The trap to watch is impatience — as one teacher told his student, your problem is not that you don't want to be great; you do, you just want it to happen in a single day, and on that day you want to sleep. Accountability and generosity. Two traits, but they grow from the same root — a self that does not need to take from others to feel whole. — The Relationship With Yourself (Traits/Reflection)

And then there is perseverance. Most people, William James noticed, never run far enough on their first wind to discover that they have a second; the trick is simply to keep climbing — to find the next curve while you are still on the first, before you can even see where it ends. The impatience to watch for is the one Rabbi Weinberg named: you want to be great, you just want it to happen in a single day, and on that day you want to sleep. So dare to begin at all, for as Kierkegaard warned, to dare is to lose your footing for a moment, but not to dare is to lose your very self — and most of what you truly want sits a mere inch outside your comfort zone, on the far side of assumptions you never thought to question. — Failure & Resilience (Challenge/Failure/Perseverance/Accountability/Flexibility/Resilience)

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