There is a part of building something that we don’t talk about nearly enough. It is the long, unglamorous stretch where you keep doing the work with very little evidence that it is actually working. You show up, make a small improvement, try again, and for quite a while, nothing exciting happens. There is no breakthrough moment and often no external validation. Then, somewhere along the way, the compounded effect of all those small actions becomes large enough to notice.

We tend to admire results because results are visible. What we don’t see are the hundreds of ordinary days that came before them. Writing my book reminded me of this. Holding a finished copy in my hands was exciting, but most of the process was anything but. It was writing and rewriting the same chapter, going through another round of edits, questioning whether something made sense, fixing it, reading it again and inevitably finding something else to fix. For a long time, I was working on a book that did not yet exist, with no guarantee that the thing I imagined would eventually become something I could hold in my hands.

One of my favourite examples of this is my best friend’s publishing journey. She taught herself the business from scratch, and when she started, one of her first earnings was $0.51. Fifty-one cents. There is something almost absurd about earning fifty-one cents from something you are trying to build and deciding to keep going anyway.

But she did. It took about five years to turn those tiny beginnings into a steady stream of income. Five years of learning, experimenting, getting things wrong, figuring out what worked and doing more of it. Today, she is earning consistently from something she taught herself to do, building a business around it and has a team of three other people working with her. Looking at what she has built today, it would be easy to call it a success story. I think the more interesting story is what happened between the fifty-one cents and the team of four.

I have seen the same thing play out in leadership. I once led a team whose engagement results were not where we wanted them to be. We listened, identified the things we believed needed to change and started working on them. Then the next engagement survey came around and the result was largely the same.

That can be very discouraging as a leader. We want teams to click quickly. We want to take the right actions and see the score move because the score reassures us that what we are doing is working. When it doesn’t, it is easy to question the approach or go searching for the next intervention.

We didn’t. We kept working on the things we believed mattered. We had the conversations. We followed through on commitments. We worked on clarity, addressed issues when they came up and made small changes to how we worked together. None of these things felt transformational on their own, and for a long time the score gave us very little evidence that they were making a difference.

Eventually, the results moved. More importantly, the team had changed.

That experience changed how I think about building high-performing teams. Culture is also a compounding exercise. Trust is built in small deposits. Engagement is shaped through hundreds of ordinary interactions. A team does not become high performing because a leader launches an initiative or because everyone has one great offsite. It happens through what people experience repeatedly: whether commitments are kept, whether difficult conversations happen, whether good work is recognised, whether people feel heard and whether their leader behaves consistently when things get difficult.

I think this is why some of the most important work of leadership can feel unrewarding while you are doing it. The individual actions seem too small to explain the eventual outcome. But that is how compounding works.

So many worthwhile things are built this way. A career, financial security, a business, a strong team, a marriage, expertise, fitness, a reputation. For a surprisingly long time, the effort can feel disproportionate to the visible result. We expect progress to be linear: I did the work, therefore I should see the result. But often the work accumulates quietly before the result becomes visible.

And this is where grit comes in. Sometimes you have to keep doing the work even when you can’t yet see whether it is making a difference. Not blindly, and not forever, but long enough to give the work a chance to bear fruit.

We live in a world where other people’s results are extraordinarily visible while most of the process that produced them remains hidden. We see the promotion but not the years of competence that preceded it. We see the successful business but not the fifty-one-cent beginning. We see the highly engaged team but not the years when the survey stubbornly refused to move. We see the published book but not the endless versions of the manuscript.

When we compare those visible outcomes with our own unfinished work, slow progress can begin to feel like failure. But sometimes nothing is wrong. Sometimes you are simply in the part where the work is still compounding.

To me, grit is less about heroic perseverance and more about being willing to keep at something when there isn’t much to show for it yet. You do the work, pay attention to what is working, adjust what isn’t, and give it time. There are times when the right thing to do is change course. But there are also times when the answer is simply to keep going.