In the Chinese culture, there is a word for that — gongfu, 功夫, which means mastery accumulated over time. Although it is used these days in English to refer to Chinese martial arts (kungfu), it’s something that can be developed for any skill, and is closer to what people say when they say “10,000 hours of deliberate practice).

There’s a meditation teacher named Adyashanti. He used to be a competitive bike racer. In one of his talks, he had talked about winning races. The audience ate it up and loved the idea, so he said, no, you don’t really want it. He explained that, that feeling of victory and accomplishment from winning a race wasn’t just the race, but all the hardships that went into the training.

And just as the audience’s enthusiasm wound down, he told a story about that woman who was in the crowd for a marathon. She ran out into the street to cross the finish line; people were confused and kinda applauded here. There was a flash of anger from the audience. How dare she cheat? And then Adyashanti put her experience in context of how crossing that finish line came without all the experience of hardship in the training. The feeling of victory, and even being applauded for it was hollow. You can feel the audience shifting from anger to pity …