A year ago, I crossed a revenue threshold in my practice that I had been working toward for a very long time.
I’m not going to tell you the number because I don’t want to brag and the number isn’t the point. What matters is that when I started this business, I did not believe that number was possible. I genuinely did not believe a solo executive coaching practice could produce that kind of revenue. It wasn’t a goal so much as a fantasy. It was something I’d heard other people had done, somewhere, under conditions that presumably didn’t apply to me.
And then I hit it.
Now my goal was never to hit a number. I’m in this business because I love what I do, want to make a difference in the world, and enjoy helping good leaders become great. But hitting that number was something I always hoped to attain because I’m in business, revenue is part of the game, and I’m trying to make a good living and provide for my family.
But when I went back and traced how I actually reached that threshold, the answer was almost embarrassingly basic.
I didn’t find a hack or stumble onto a strategy nobody else knew.
I just stayed with it longer than was comfortable, and I showed up when it didn’t feel fun.
In other words… I was persistent.
We have built a culture that treats persistence as a failure of imagination.
We live in a moment that has almost no patience for patience.
Everywhere you go, you are inundated with messages about the quick fix, and everyone is trying to sell you one. Just yesterday, in my Instagram feed, I saw advertisements promising 30 days to a new body, 6 weeks to build your business, and a very weird protocol that would help you unlock your inner passion so you could manifest whatever the heck you wanted.
The promise underneath all of this is identical:
You don’t have to stay with anything for very long in order to succeed.
This is a lie!
As if bouncing around from idea to idea, role to role, venture to venture, searching for your passion or your thing, is somehow going to turn you into the successful person you always wanted to be. As if the right answer is going to reveal itself to you mid-bounce, and everything after that will be easy.
If any of you have been caught up in messages like these, welcome to the club. You are not alone, and I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve gone down some of these rabbit holes. I’ve tried a little of this and a little of that, all with the justification that I’m trying to find the right way forward. But there is no right way forward. There are many great ways forward, and honestly, any of them will do if you are moving toward a destination you actually want.
But here is the bigger issue.
The assumption that patience and persistence aren’t valuable is destructive. I see this across all generations, and it is now part of the cultural story.
Just look around and see how it shows up in all walks of life. A company launches an initiative in January. By April, the results are ambiguous (not bad, just ambiguous), and someone with power gets nervous. By June, there’s a new initiative and the old one dies on the vine. I’ve seen this pattern throughout my career, and I bet we can all point to our own organizational graveyard of half-finished initiatives. Each one abandoned right before it would have started to work, and a workforce that has learned, quite rationally, not to invest emotionally in anything leadership announces.
We call this “being agile” but it is really just fear.
LEGO almost died from this exact disease.
One great example of this is LEGO. By the early 2000s, LEGO was in real trouble. They were hundreds of millions in debt and losing money fast. The company had spent years chasing whatever looked hot, and they had drifted so far from the brick that you could barely find the brick.
They tried to get into theme parks, media, clothing, education, and video game production. But by 2004, they were an example of diversification failure. The company ran away from the hard, unglamorous work of being extraordinary at the boring thing it was actually created to do.
The turnaround, under Jørgen Vig Knudstorp, was simple. He cut the sprawl, went back to the brick, and then did the tedious things year after year until LEGO became one of the most successful toy companies on the planet.
They didn’t win by finding something new. They won by being persistent and focusing on what made them unique.
Why persistence is a prerequisite for a subtle shift.
Here’s what I’ve come to believe, and it’s the thing I didn’t say clearly enough in the book.
Persistence is a prerequisite for Subtle Shifts.
Change takes time, and there are no quick fixes, even though we all really want there to be.
If we want to change something, it will require sustained attention, and in a world where our attention is under attack, guarding it is our greatest responsibility.
Several months ago, I wrote about a framework I created called The Achievement Engine©, and it is a very simple concept. Attention drives our assumptions. Assumptions drive our actions, and our actions drive our achievements.
Looking back at my own framework, I realized that the engine helped me grow my business and hit the number I mentioned earlier, but I couldn’t have done it without persistence.
Persistence kept my attention focused long enough to help me find my way. Persistence guided me into a community of people who were willing to teach me how to build a successful business. Persistence helped me see what was possible, which shifted my assumptions.
Once my assumption about what was possible changed, my actions changed. I changed the types of clients I pursued, the services I offered, and the way I sold them. It changed what I said yes and no to and how I talked about my own work. I didn’t have to force those actions. They became obvious. And then the achievement showed up.
I hit that number!
The engine did the work, but persistence just kept it running long enough to turn over.
The quick-fix culture has to end.
Before I wrap this up, I want to ask you to be persistent in remembering this point:
The quick-fix culture has to end.
It is so destructive in so many ways because it interrupts our attention. Every time you redirect your attention, you reset The Achievement Engine, and you never stay anywhere long enough to accumulate the exposure that would have changed what you believe. You keep your old assumptions perfectly intact, and then you wonder why nothing ever changes.
It is time for us to build our cognitive endurance.
So here’s the subtle shift.
Shift your assumption away from “I need to find the thing that works” to “I need to stay with something long enough for it to work.”
The quick-fix mind believes the answer is out there, undiscovered. It entices us to seek out one more tactic, program, or expert to show us the way. It treats persistence as what you do after you’ve found the right thing.
Flip it.
Persistence is the thing that produces the right thing, and without it, you’ll struggle to meet your goals.
