Perserverence

"When teaching this point, I sometimes use an example from outside my research that perfectly illustrates the idea: The UCLA Bruins basketball dynasty of the 1960s and early 1970s. Most basketball fans know that the Bruins won ten NCAA Championships in twelve years, at one point assembling a sixty-one-game winning streak, under the legendary coach John Wooden.

But do you know how many years Wooden coached the Bruins before his first NCAA Championship? Fifteen. From 1948 to 1963, Wooden worked in relative obscurity before winning his first championship in 1964. Year by year, Coach Wooden built the underlying foundations, developing a recruiting system, implementing a consistent philosophy, and refining the full-court-press style of play. NO one paid too much attention to the quiet, soft-spoken coach and his team until-wham!-they hit breakthrough and systematically crushed every serious competitor for more than a decade."

Jim Collins, Good to Great, Pg. 171-172