“The drops of rain make a hole in the stone not by violence but by oft falling.”

— Lucretius

A green belt was in class tonight at the Dragon’s Way Academy.

You can't see persistence. But it's real.

A green belt is someone who is quite a bit better at Chung Kuo Chuan than a white belt. I am a white belt.

The man owning the green belt’s name was Brian and he was in our class so he could get extra practice. As we warmed up, we chatted. Turns out Brian has been doing martial arts for about two years. You can see that’s he’s become quite proficient by his green belt.

What you can’t see, just looking at Brian, is that he has lost 50 pounds.

Since he started, Brian has worked out regularly and stopped smoking. He told me his wife has dropped almost 100 pounds in the same time period. Dramatic weight loss, done the right way, is something you don’t just notice. I would have had to met Brian two years ago just to see the difference.

Even then, I still couldn’t have seen his persistence. Persistence isn’t something you see. It is what you do when no one is looking.

It’s sweating day after day at martial arts for two years. It’s handing out 400 flyers so that 40 people will donate food to a food drive on 9/11. It’s changing a reader board 20 times to keep a school community informed and to help make the school look professional. It’s doing the dishes for over a year to earn a trip with your dad to Washington D.C.

Like my friend Linda Cohen of 1000 Mitzvahs and I talked about over lunch today. You can’t go look at her 1000 acts of kindness like you can look at a reuben sandwich. Those acts of kindness aren’t visible, but they are very real. Persistence is also very real.

By reading this post, you can’t see the persistence it takes to give your time everyday. However, I would still encourage you to take up the challenge and try to give your time in some small way every day.

Like persistence, you won’t see the changes in your life. But they will be very real.

Today’s gift of time … Still wearing our martial arts uniforms, my daughters and I changed the reader board at my daughter’s school. We got a funny look from a little Chinese lady who walked by.