The effort, endurance, and morale required to accomplish valuable work hinge on how clear the purpose of the journey is:
It’s why people can finish a marathon, because they know that after 26.2 miles of intense running they will have crossed an important threshold.
It’s why people can build great products, because they know that it’s through iterating between feedback and improvement that building something helpful becomes a distinct possibility.
Sometimes when you and your team are mid-marathon and in the deepest section of a valley, though, a temporary amnesia sets in: present roadblocks tend to overshadow your memory of the impact you set out to make and as a result your willingness to persist becomes exceptionally vulnerable.
The longterm resilience of you, your team, and your work depends on a culture of contextualizing the valley — of making an intentional effort to put any current and impending challenges into the broader context of the change and impact you all agreed to make at the outset.
A struggle with lost context is a vulnerability; a struggle with context is power.