Endurance is nobler than strength, and patience than beauty.

Strength is a moment and endurance is a duration, which is why the second is harder to admire and much harder to fake. Anybody can be impressive briefly. Staying in something long after the impressive part has gone requires a different quality altogether, and the same distinction holds between a face and the capacity to wait well.

The things worth having almost all take the second kind: raising anyone, learning anything properly, repairing what got broken. If you feel unremarkable at the moment, count how long you have kept going at something. That is the measure in question, and most people undercount it.