The Patience of Champions

The Patience of Champions

Golf has never interested me. But the Masters? That's different. The stories, the heroics, even the pimento cheese sandwiches. I'm captivated.

Yesterday's 89th Masters showed us something remarkable. Rory McIlroy became the first player in a quarter-century to complete the grand slam. But he nearly didn't.

McIlroy entered Augusta carrying an 11-year major drought—nearly 4,000 days of "almost" and "not quite." In Thursday's opening round, he double-bogeyed 15 and 17, falling seven shots behind Justin Rose. Only two players in history (Nick Faldo and Tiger Woods) have overcome such a deficit at Augusta.

By Sunday, McIlroy had engineered a stunning reversal, building a five-stroke lead—only to squander it entirely and face a playoff on the very hole that had just cost him the win.

Think about that timeline: from hopeless, to commanding, to heartbreak, to redemption. All within 72 holes.

The thing about persistence is that it's rarely dramatic in real time. It's showing up when the cameras aren't rolling. It's believing when the evidence suggests otherwise.

Most of us quit at the inflection point—right before the breakthrough. We hear "no" in meetings, watch relationships dissolve, see projects falter, and decide: enough.

What would our work look like if we persisted through a decade of setbacks? There's a hairline fracture between belief and delusion, a vast canyon between success and failure. Navigating both simultaneously requires something increasingly rare.

Perhaps that's why yesterday felt so special.