The Long Game
People who are good at something for a long time are rarely the ones who were best at it in year one. They're the ones who were still doing it in year five, when most of the initial crowd had quietly moved on to something else.
This is easy to say and hard to act on, because nothing about year two feels like it's building toward year five. It just feels like year two: slower than you'd like, full of mistakes you thought you'd already made once. The trick, if there is one, is judging yourself by whether you're still in the game rather than by how well you're playing it this month.
Talent buys you a faster start. It doesn't buy you the years. Nothing buys you the years except deciding, repeatedly, to keep having them.