These 5 words will give you strength, stamina, and courage for life’s most challenging tasks

Walk the long road, play the long game

The year was 2010. I had decided that I was going to learn Spanish. And I had absolutely no idea how hard it would be.

I worked on pronunciation. (Spanish has some syllables that my mouth just couldn’t make for quite a while. Try saying rest-aa-ooh-RAHN-tay quickly and easily — it’s not a word that a speaker of English can say without practice.)

I worked on vocabulary. Verbs, nouns, adjectives, everything. No matter how many times I saw a word, I couldn’t remember it. It was like using a crayon to carve a slab of stainless steel. Same for verb conjugations, sentence structure, grammar, you name it.

Over 100 hours of practice, and I still had nothing.

I felt so sorry for myself! It should be easier than this, I told myself. I can’t do this. It’s too hard. Finally I told myself, “Well, you’ve got two choices. You can either give up, or you can keep going.” And I decided to keep going.

You’ve been in the same place too, haven’t you?

When you gave up, you felt depressed and discouraged. And when you kept going, you complained, you struggled with resentment, you had to fight yourself— every day — to keep from giving up. All of that is agonizing, it tires you out, and it makes a hard job harder.

Fortunately, there is one thing you can tell yourself that will empower you to tackle the hardest tasks with energy and determination. With it, you can crash through the wall you’ve built around yourself and achieve things — both personal and professional — that exist beyond what you currently think are possible.

Whatever you call it — command, rule, or mantra — tell yourself this whenever you need to:

“Keep playing the long game”

You suffer when you don’t know

“Playing the long game” is what you are doing in two situations:

1. when you commit to reaching a goal that will take you a long time; and
2. when you choose a longer path to a goal because it will get you a better result or be more likely to succeed

I have been playing the long game all my life. It took me several decades of therapy to repair my low self-esteem and develop needed social skills. It took 20 years of searching to find the woman I wanted to marry. It’s taken me eight years (so far) to learn Spanish.

And for all these things, I suffered a lot because I didn’t know I was playing the long game. Because I thought that success would come sooner and with a lot less work:

• I was crushed by feelings that I wasn’t good enough to succeed
• I was devastated by each failure along the way
• I was frustrated by how so much hard work resulted in so little progress
• I wanted to give up when I saw the long road ahead

As soon as you accept that your task will take a long time, all these things lose their power over you.

Knowing makes all the difference

Once you think of your ongoing work as existing inside the long game, many negative emotions and self-judgments either vanish or become much more manageable. (It also helps to know that only effort brings success, to see failures in a more constructive way, to engage fully with problems, and to persevere no matter what.)

Another big win in playing the long game is that you will do a better job when you give it the time it needs, not the (shorter) time you want it to take.

CEO Jeff Bezos made this point using the example of the “high-standards, six-page memo” that Amazon uses to drive its decision-making. Bezos believes that when an employee writes a mediocre memo,

…it’s not the writer’s inability to recognize the high standard, but instead a wrong expectation on scope: they mistakenly believe a high-standards, six-page memo can be written in one or two days or even a few hours, when really it might take a week or more!

His conclusion:

The key point here is that you can improve results through the simple act of teaching scope — that a great memo probably should take a week or more.

Impossible goals and the long game

About the same time as World War II, Antonio Vicente saw how deforested land in Brazil also lost its water reserves and, through erosion, its valuable topsoil. “After 3 to 4 years,” he said, “the soil turned into sand and nothing grows.”

Nobody believed that this damage could ever be undone, but Vicente disagreed. Over 40 years, he planted over 50,000 trees on some land that he owned, land that had been razed for cattle grazing. Now the land is fully reforested, and there’s no shortage of water — in fact, no fewer than eight waterfalls. And people throughout the world came to know that transforming the land was something that people could do — and Antonio Vicente did it by playing the long game.

What happens when you play the long game

I’ve accomplished some really hard things in my life, and I suffered through most of them. Suffering happens when the world is one way and you won’t give up the idea that it’s something different. So although it’s true that pain is an inescapable part of life, it’s also true that suffering is optional.

Playing the long game causes a shift in your consciousness that will change your life. It makes you enlarge the scope of what you want to do to a realistic size. And when you give up your unrealistic belief that your task will take less time, it also removes a lot of the suffering that would otherwise happen.

This fundamental shift, this reduction of suffering, occurs for things that we need to do, like staying in a difficult job, achieving difficult goals, or making big changes to provide for our families and keep them safe. It also occurs for the tasks that we choose to do to — things like acquiring new skills, establishing habits that make life easier and better, replacing negative behaviors with positive ones, and achieving big goals that will make our lives healthier, happier, and more meaningful.

Now my life is transformed

Understanding the long game, I feel lighter, less anxious about the limits of what I can accomplish. I no longer worry about how long it will take me to accomplish something. I know that if I do the work, day after day, I will eventually succeed.

The future feels spacious, immense. Life is large, and I am large in the world. More is possible, and I have the rest of my life to reach my goals.

And you can have this, too

You may feel hemmed in by life. You may believe that you’ll never get very far from where you are right now. But you couldn’t be more wrong:

• In a few months, you could improve your relationship with your spouse, a change that will make your life better for years to come.
• In less than a year, you could exercise your way to better health, and you will feel better every day.
• In two years, you could graduate with a technical degree, do more interesting work, and make life better for yourself and the people you love.
• In less than 10 years, you could find a worthwhile life partner, start a family, and have the pleasure of walking your child to school.

And what might you accomplish in 10 years? Or 20? Or maybe even 40?

Time will pass, whether you do something or not. Have the courage to start. You can improve your life, and you have all the time you need.

Extra credit assignment

What would it be like to stop that voice inside you that keeps calling you things like stupid, lazy, worthless, and so on? Wouldn’t that improve every day of your life?

You can have this new, happier life in a month or two. Read “How to Stop Saying Bad Things About Yourself” and do the things it recommends every day, each of which takes only a few seconds at a time. Choose to do this, and you will succeed.

Dear Reader, Medium’s decision to allow 1 to 50 👏🏽s is crazy. So I think of clapping as a 1-to-5-stars rating, with 10 claps = 1 star.

I clap 10 times — or 20 — for the articles I read. Not clapping at all feels bad.

Please help me out. This helps me reach more people. Thank you!