A skill you build in a year can serve you for sixty. That’s a pretty good exchange rate for patience.

A year of effort is a real price, and it is also the only thing standing between you and something you will have for the rest of your life. Driving, swimming, an instrument, a language, cooking, all bought once and used for decades. Almost nothing else you spend a year on pays back at that rate.

List the skills you would like to have at thirty and choose the one you would use most weeks. Then put a year on it, which sounds long and is roughly four hundred short sessions. Begin the first one this week rather than planning the whole thing.