New Endeavors Can be Slow and Arduous at Start

Rob Dial is a young man who has an ongoing podcast, titled Mindset Mentor, that he puts out several times a week and on which he discusses various topics concerning motivation and self-improvement.  I've been listening to him off and on for the past few weeks...sometimes he seems on-target with his message and sometimes he's a little off, in my opinion.  One of his messages I did resonate with was when he said that starting something new from scratch usually doesn't yield much significant fruit for some time...sometimes a few months will elapse before there are encouraging results.  To that I might add that often at the start of a new self-improvement project...losing weight, for example...there can be a false sense of great progress at the start followed by a more sobering degree of improvement if not stagnation for a while.  Being a runner, after my surgery this past July 15th I wanted to return to that activity, actually running in place a minute or two on August 18th.  Even though in the previous 11 years I had run 12 half-marathons and many more races of middle-to-long distance, starting again from zero has been a slow and arduous process...I wasn't able to simply run around my home neighborhood block (.7 mile) without needing to take walking breaks until October 20th, three months later.  But a little more than a month after that I accomplished a 10-mile slow training run and this past Saturday I finished my first race, a 5K event.  But those initial weeks were slow and often discouraging for me and I still have a long way to go.  I write this not so much about running per se, but about any endeavor that I or you or anyone else might be interested in, with the ultimate aim of achieving competency or even possibly excellence in it.  At the beginning the going can be rough and it might not seem like you're up to the task with any progress being slow and positive feedback in short supply.  But then a day will come when the hard work you have put into it for weeks or even months will result in a breakthrough...there aren't many things in life that beat that.  I have a new endeavor I'm tackling and expect the same slow, humbling initial apparent lack of progress...and also expect that breakthrough down the line in a few weeks.  The trick is in faithfully sticking with it during this challenging time...