Ten years ago, I ran my second half-marathon. It’s as hard as the tar road that my feet pounded on for the 2 hours and 38 minutes of my run. Sometime after the midway point, I looked at my Fitbit and thought with some annoyance, “Just half the way!”

Here’s the thing about endurance, whether physical or professional: the middle is where most people quit.

The dance between pain and progress

I tried to connect with the pain, isolating it to every muscle, every joint. Then I tried to block it with distracting thoughts and went back and forth like this. After a while, my whole focus went to willing one leg in front of the other. That’s how I kept going and finished the race.

It’s one of life’s cruel ironies that the most rewarding things are also the hardest to achieve.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers tells us that to be really good at something, we must complete 10,000 hours of practice. To be rich, we must work hard to put out equivalent value in exchange. To be fit, we must watch what we eat and exercise. To be mentally sharp, we must be aggressive learners and continually train our brains. None of these are easy to do, otherwise everyone would be successful.

Choosing growth over comfort

Achievers know that success follows great effort and most are not willing to do what it takes. Instead, we opt for our default setting to take the easy way out. In doing so, we sell ourselves short.

Those who do not strive to live up to their full potential, which is always bigger than we believe it to be, will never feel alive. And that to me is a very sad thing.

If I chose to go on default, and I did for a very long time when it came to my physical fitness, I would have gone further downhill from an already bad place. I used to be overweight and not caring. My physician eventually told me I had become the healthiest I’d ever been.

From personal grit to collective greatness

I beat my first run and aimed to cut my time down by 15 minutes for my next. Easy to say once the aches were gone, but that exhilarating feeling of achievement is well worth experiencing over and over.

Unlike the shaping of one’s own life, succeeding at a company level is more complex with the many individuals involved. The reward must be worthwhile to everyone. We must all have a strong will to succeed. All the smaller plans must support the big plan. Everyone must put in great effort.

The lesson from that race a decade ago still holds true: whether in running or business, achievers fight default settings every day.

The question isn’t whether the path will be hard. It will be. The question is whether you’re willing to keep putting one foot in front of the other when everything in you wants to stop. That’s where transformation happens. That’s where companies become great. That’s where we discover what we’re really capable of achieving.