Stamina usually has a physical and competitive connotation — those with greater stamina can outwork and outlast opponents.

While stamina is the ability to sustain focused effort despite pain or discomfort, you should also think of it as the ability to stay true to your values and commitments — to hold fidelity to a worthy purpose — especially when it’s hard to do so.

Stamina, in this way, is not just the thing you deploy to keep running when your legs have gone volcanic. It’s contributing as part of a team that, let’s say, has posed a challenging experience for all involved. It’s returning for another go at a problem that has repeatedly turned your mind into oatmeal (the kind with that creepy skin after it’s been left out awhile). It’s being a patient parent or partner despite bone-deep exhaustion.

It’s the ability to chip away at goals despite a lack of visible progress. To hold focus and presence in a world incentivized to distract you. To stay patient. To be on time. To push through difficult material. To follow instructions or proceed without them. To keep an open mind and be willing to renew your perspective.

Stamina is one of the most universally useful traits you can develop — it’s a more broadly applicable advantage than things that are situationally useful, like strength, intelligence, speed, popularity, motivation, etc.

Maybe a smarter, more naturally gifted person can be sporadically brilliant, and solve a tough problem way faster than you. But you, with your staying power, can more capably and reliably solve the 100 problems that follow.

“[Happiness] is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.”

~Helen Keller