Persistence: How to win the slog

While I was doing my doctoral thesis on Einstein's work, one of the top five things that impressed me was the awful, critical need to survive the long slog, the longest period in any deeply creative project, or indeed deeply creative life, when it's just not fun and it often seems for nothing, but without which there will be nothing.

Surviving the slog is much about persistence, as illustrated in this generous, slightly raw story about a fiction writer who is struggling, succeeding, and defining it all through the lens of persistence.

This is the truest thing I've read all week.

My favorite tidbit from the story:

I’d soon realize persistence wasn’t an end game. It was the name of the road.

Persistence isn't something we employ in order to get there, wherever that may be. It isn't something we do for long enough with the reward that at last we can be done with persisting. It is the road.

As long as we have a question to answer, a vision to make real, a direction we want to head in, there will be a long slog. We can choose to persist, or we can give up caring deeply about anything. May we long be fortunate enough to care deeply.