Henry Ford wanted to build a V6 engine. His engineers told him it was impossible, but he was relentless. He told them to get to work anyway, and so they did. A year later, there was no progress, the engineers again told Ford that they could not find a way to do what he was asking them. But still, Ford refused to listen, he insisted that they continue. And then, almost by magic, the engineers succeeded in building the engine. Ford got what he wanted.
It is often the case that people come very close to success, a few steps away, and then they quit. They had the expectations that they would get what they wanted easily, and when they realize the difficulty of the task, they are turned off. Or they anticipated the difficulty of the task and persisted anyway but somewhere along the way, after enough defeats, they gave up.
The point of this chapter is that persistence is magical. It is a fact of nature that nothing great can be achieved without relentless persistence, and yet it is our false expectations, laziness, and ignorance that gets in the way.
Few are willing to admit this to themselves, it is easier to just say that they were unlucky, or to focus on the impossibility of realising their goal.