Enthusiasm Is Good, But Endurance Is Better
“Enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.”
Starting is easy. Everyone who sets out to create something is enthusiastic at the beginning. But as you get deeper into the project, that enthusiasm fades. And eventually, you’re left sitting in the dark shadow of the mountain you now have to climb.
Enthusiasm will fuel your beginning. But it’s endurance that will get you to the end.
Everything Is Easy At The Beginning.
In the beginning, everything is possible.
You’re in what I call the realm of possibility: your dreams come true in your mind before you have to do any of the work to get there. There’s no rejection to deal with. There’s no failure. There’s no risk you have to take. It’s just endless, glorious possibility. And this makes it easy to start.
It’s not until you take a few steps along the path that you realize how much work your project is going to take.
I found a great graph that represents this journey:
Enthusiasm gets you to: “Ok, this seems fun.” That’s the point when you realize the mountain you’re climbing is a lot bigger than you thought. Most people quit at this point because they’re not really passionate about the thing they thought they wanted to build. They’re not willing to suffer for it.
The other point people quit is at “I know nothing.” This is the worst place to quit because this is the final big valley before you make a breakthrough. At this point, most of your initial enthusiasm for the project is gone.
Enthusiasm will get you started, but it’s endurance that will get you to the end. And that means suffering over the thing you’re creating.
To Have Passion Is To Endure The Pain It Will Bring.
There’s a passage in Derek Sivers’ book, How To Live, that changed for me what it means to be passionate about something:
“The English word ‘passion’ comes from the Latin word ‘pati,’ meaning ‘to suffer or endure.’ To be passionate about something is to be willing to suffer for it — to endure the pain it’ll bring.”
When I shared this on Twitter, a follower told me that:
“The German word for passion is ‘Leidenschaft’ which basically translates as ‘the vocation of suffering.’”
To be passionate is to choose to suffer over something. That suffering is an intrinsic characteristic of your passion - you can’t remove it without removing the passion itself.
And this is a great filter to figure out what you should work on. Whatever it is you start, you must be willing to suffer over it if you are to finish. If you’re not willing to endure the pain it will bring, choose something else.
Enduring Pain Now Gets You More Later.
The biggest wins in life come from suffering over your passion in the short term to get more in the long term. It’s called playing the long game.
Here’s Naval Ravikant talking about this in an excerpt from The Almanack of Naval Ravikant:
“Most of the gains in life come from suffering in the short term so you can get paid in the long term. Working out for me is not fun; I suffer in the short term, I feel pain. But then in the long term, I’m better off because I have muscles or I’m healthier.
If I am reading a book and I’m getting confused, it is just like working out and the muscle getting sore or tired, except now my brain is being overwhelmed. In the long run I’m getting smarter because I’m absorbing new concepts from working at the limit or edge of my capability. So you generally want to lean into things with short-term pain, but long-term gain.”
Endurance is what allows you to collect your reward at the end of the game.
It’s the same in investing. You have to deal with a lot of short-term volatility (pain) to do really well over the long run. The SPY index exemplifies this:
Look at the declines you would have had to sit through in the early 2000s, in 2008, in 2016, and in 2019, to get to where the index is today.
As Charlie Munger says: “If you're going to be in this game for the long pull, which is the way to do it, you better be able to handle a 50% decline without fussing too much about it.”
endurance Is Everything.
Endurance is the difference between quitting before the reward and sticking around long enough to win it.
Investing is easy until you’re down 50 percent. Enthusiasm is strong until you realize how difficult the task really is. Starting is easy and finishing is hard. Enthusiasm is good, but endurance is better.
Endurance is everything.
Keep going.
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ARTICLE SOURCES
Derek Sivers. How to Live. Hit Media. Kindle Edition.
Jorgenson, Eric. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. Magrathea Publishing. Kindle Edition.
Naval Ravikant - How To Get Rich: Every Episode