A minute’s success pays the failure of years.

Years of effort with nothing to show for them feel like a debt piling up. The ledger is not really kept that way. When the thing finally works, the long stretch behind it stops reading as waste and starts reading as the cost of arriving.

If you are somewhere in the middle of those years, the useful question is not how long this has taken. Ask whether the work is still teaching you something, and whether you would still want it if it came slowly. That answer, not the tally, is what tells you to keep going.