Everything worth pursuing has obstacles
Finding happiness, finding your soul mate, building a successful career or network, becoming an artist or an elite athlete, inventing new things, building an audience.
All these things that we'd love achieving have one thing in common: they're full of obstacles. They're not easy to get.
It’s like treasures hiding behind a brick wall.
But how do people usually try to get the treasure? They brace themselves, take a few step back, and suddenly ram into the brick wall, in hope they’ll break it. But it’s a brick wall, and all that’s going to happen by doing that, is one will just smash into the wall, without the wall budging, and the person will be bruised, if not knocked out. They will get up, be frustrated and give up thinking it’s impossible. For each and everyone, the first attempts will inevitably lead to failure. Except that there are different types of failure. Pros fail like amateurs, but with one difference
Start small and iterate.
The other way is to probe everywhere on the wall for a weak point, an tiny area where you can start to slowly scratch. You then proceed to scratch, and slowly, but surely, you erode the wall, little by little. You keep going, until you start digging in the wall so deep in the same area that, soon, the whole structure of the wall starts to weaken. You keep going, until you finally dig a little hole. From there, you thrust through the wall, scratching an area larger and larger, until the whole wall crumbles. This is the process of Deliberate practice.