On May 29, 1953, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay were the first men to climb to the top of Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain, a summit over 29,000 feet high. Various expeditions had tried, as early as 1885—but none reached the summit before Hillary and Norgay nearly 70 years later.
On September 19, 1994, after 8 long years of relentless effort and on the verge of giving up, mathematician Andrew Wiles finally proved Fermat’s Last Theorem, a mathematical theorem that some of the most brilliant minds in history had been unable to prove for hundreds of years before him. He even thought he had proved it in 1993, but was found to have made a few logical errors in the proof that seemed insurmountable. But a year later, he had figured it out.
These feats are noteworthy, not because they were easy, but because they were hard. It is no real achievement for most of us to climb to the top of our basement stairs, or to show that 2+2=4. And I suspect we don’t really take much joy in them either. When you’re staring a difficult challenge in the face, take joy not only in how it will make you better, but in knowing that it is precisely the difficulty that will ultimately give you joy in the achievement.
Have a wonderful day.
