At a recent soccer practice, my goalkeeper coach told me: “Footwork is like the gospel to me. If you have good footwork, then you don’t need to make that amazing save.”

My coach’s views definitely resonate with my own experiences with goalkeeping. Last season, I found myself thinking that correct positioning is nine-tenths of the law. If you’re in the right position when an opponent sends a shot towards the goal, you’re much more likely to make a save, even if all you do is stand there and reflexively catch the ball.

My friends and family are impressed by the progress that my two rescue dogs, Max and Shiloh, have made in their mental health. Both dogs came to me traumatized and anxious, and now they’re beautiful, loving members of our family who steal the bed and provide us with plenty of attitude. Significant gains indeed. But most of those gains have been made by small, incremental efforts that accumulate over time: systematically experimenting with anti-anxiety medications, setting an alarm each Friday to arrange their medication trays for the coming week to ensure they receive the correct doses, making small home improvements to reduce the number of triggers that the dogs experience each day, and preparing a truly endless number of peanut butter mats to provide the dogs with enrichment. Boring as hell, but one of my greatest accomplishments in life.

At any task worth doing, 90% is going to be boring. By “boring”, I don’t mean mind-numbing — it is my experience that being competent at executing a meaningful task is one of life’s great joys. By “boring”, I mean unsexy to the outside observer. We might celebrate a scientist for their Nobel Prize or for their life-saving innovation, but nobody wants to watch that scientist sitting at their desk and persevering through endless hours of trials. We might enjoy watching a world-class athlete’s performance, but nobody wants to watch that athlete’s thousands of hours of deliberate training to incrementally improve their skills.

And this is empowering news. Nobody can wake up today and develop life-saving medication or become a world-class athlete. But if we know what aspirations are deeply important to our souls, then we can systematically persevere with that boring 90%.

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