Why endurance outlasts natural talent

I’ve seen this over and over again out here.

You see something compelling on your favorite social media platform. It’s some ambitious individual who has a golden pitch about providing the “secret” to [insert pain point here] and how it’s going to change your life if ONLY you sign up for their weekly newsletter. You click on it and get some great stuff from this person for a few issues. The person is a brilliant writer, full of depth and punch, and their content is insightful on so many levels…

Then silence.

Months and months go by and out of nowhere, this person resurfaces again. This time, they have a short life update and some reasons as to why they stopped dropping by your inbox. You consider unsubscribing but decide to give them another chance. They swear up, down, and sideways that they’ve got some important new realizations to share with you and to “stay tuned” to what they’re going to say in the next issue…

You never hear from them again.

Let’s wrap up this mental munchy with a revisit to the classic tale of the tortoise and the hare.

Hard work and perseverance bring reward

We all know and love/hate/love/hate/ad infinitum the parable of these two animals.

• The love part of it is that it reminds us that meritocracy is an ideal to be aspired to when it comes to self development and self actualization.

• The hate portion is that the real world abuses those who actually rise to meet the moment as corporate politics screws them over repeatedly.

The truth is, as always, that there’s a vast gray area between the two extremes where we must operate on.

There are vast quantities of stories that are retold out there of people who go from rags to riches or from a 9-5 to freedom.

• the janitor who socked away millions through investing

• the young dentist who became a successful writer and entrepreneur

• the runner who overcame a debilitating handicap that left him almost crippled for years

As the saying goes, the difference between success and failure is just a matter of time and effort. As we all know the tale, here’s the skinny of the story:

Doing 90% of the work in seconds and then stopping isn’t the same as doing 100% of the work in years.

Too many people on social media come and go selling the dream and then ghosting their audience. Most newsletters don’t make it 10 issues. Most YouTube channels don’t make it past 5 videos. There are more abandoned Medium and Substack profiles, dead Slack and Discord channels, and inactive OnlyFans accounts than there are active and lucrative ones.

Makes me wonder about the vast expanse of the digital graveyard.

The truth is that not everything that goes to the internet will last there forever. Trillions of petabytes of information are going to come and go throughout the life of the internet. It’s a digital monument to our presence on this planet, and it’ll probably be one of those things that will outlast us long after we’re gone.

Your job is to inspire others with your own versions of this tale.

The purpose of a digital heirloom is a head fake

“The Last Lecture” by Dr. Randy Pausch is a powerful legacy that is left behind by Carnegie Mellon University professor.

Even after nearly 17 years since his death, this guy has inspired millions to pursue their dreams by sharing his own stories of perseverance and overcoming obstacles. From facing and accepting his own battle with pancreatic cancer on his terms to being one of the pioneers of the Alice program to teach programming in an accessible way, his legacy was about pursuing and knocking out his childhood dreams and bucket list.

Enabling others and empowering them to pursue them is one of the most powerful things a person can do.

This was the “head fake” that was the whole point of his book as memorialized in his final presentation at CMU. You can watch this incredible talk to this day as memorialized on their YouTube channel:

I hope that someday his three children will share what they got from his story despite the fact that he was only physically a part of their lives for a few years. At this point, they’re all in their 20s…time sure does fly.

History doesn’t repeat but…

It often rhymes, doesn’t it?

Look at what’s happening to our country right now.

The truth is that human nature hasn’t changed, our technology just accelerates and enables us to share it more often and much faster. The problems that we face and overcome aren’t going to change all that much either. The lessons that Dr. Pausch learned and shared before he passed are still, if not more so, relevant today.

He would be 64 as of this writing if he were still alive today.

Unfortunately, he died in 2008, right on the edge of the smartphone revolution. One can wonder what he’d have to say about all the things that have happened with society and technology.

• Space flight is now a fledgling commercial enterprise.

• Computer science is now one of the core disciplines at the foundation of everything from social media to AI.

• Disney is now a media empire that possesses multiple franchises that were still all separate when he was alive.

These were all things that he had a hand in, and they aren’t anything to sniff at. The challenges he encountered, the brick walls he faced to get to contribute to each of these areas, are the same ones we face throughout our own lives.

It’s not what we face. It’s how we face it.

So what kinds of stories of overcoming obstacles do you want to pass on?

P. S.

As usual, I’m going to take a week to write about what else comes to mind (mainly chewing on what place AI has in our lives). The next series is going to cover something that I’m looking forward to sharing:

Self expression through the arts. Creativity and how it shapes our identity. How to use it for your digital heirloom.