“Yet”.
You can append it after any sentence related to your journey of achievement and contribution.
“I haven’t finished the project”
“I haven’t learned how to juggle”
“I haven’t made the sale”
YET.
And along the way, “Yet” turns “can’t” into “haven’t.”
Yet isn’t the result of brazen persistence. It’s what we earn with learning, insight and generosity.
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PS I just finished George Dyson’s latest, Analogia. It’s a stunning tour de force, a wide-ranging book that includes a heartbreaking chronicle of the genocide of Native Americans, riffs about Project Orion (a spaceship powered by atomic bombs) as well as a three-hundred-year arc of the past and future of computers and our co-evolution with them. I could see this book being the only thing studied over the course of a semester, it contains so many rich eddies, currents and insights. And don’t even get me started on the treehouse and the thirty-foot kayak.