I recently watched a documentary on the history of the Boeing 747 Jumbo Jet, and I was struck by how insane, stressful, and virtually impossible the challenges were that the engineers faced, betting the entire company on a plane that may never take off. It ended up revolutionizing air travel, putting more people in the skies than anyone ever imagined. It was a contentious, seemingly unwinnable battle from start to finish to put that plane is the sky --- yet all we see and experience is the joy of flying in a world-changing airplane.
I'd have to say my #1 takeaway from the past year or so from personal experience, reading books, and watching documentaries like that, has been that my expectations for how easy accomplishing anything would be --- how much time and work it would take --- have been all grossly, stupidly out of touch with reality. Good things take time, work, and persistence, and great things take an unimaginable amount of them. Period. And even then, with all of that, success isn't guaranteed one bit. That is precisely why great things are so uncommon in the first place.
Even though we all already know there's no such thing as overnight success, I think most stories of success we read about still fail to do justice to the amount of sacrifice and persistence required to achieve anything. So now the task is to have your work ethic and stomach for enduring false starts and failure catch up with your sky-high ambitions. Not easy, but if you believe you're born to fly, you don't have a choice.
