When I was in high school I came across this quote posted on a bulletin board. I crossed it several times a week and it stuck with me.

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without a single crack in sight.

Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that last
blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

-Jacob Riis

Ironically, this is also the mantra for San Antonio Spurs, my favorite NBA team.