I’ve been trying to work out a way to use a teleprompter to be able to read scripts for my YouTube channel without having to do any editing. (My traditional scripted videos, which use an audio track with pictures meant for illustration is extremely time-consuming and I just don’t have the time right now.) I’m trying the teleprompter because I’ve found that if you can see a human being speaking, it’s not a big deal if they occasionally correct themselves, but it feels really weird for that if it’s a disembodied voice.

Unfortunately, when it comes to figuring out how to read a script off of a teleprompter, there’s no substitute for actually trying the thing and seeing how it goes. Which means I’ve had various takes of five to twenty minutes that were no good and had to be thrown out. In several cases these got junked by having the teleprompter settings off (too slow/wrong font size) or the AI teleprompter which uses speech recognition to advance the words losing track and giving up. In some cases, it was finding all of the settings on my laptop to have it stop going to sleep automatically. And in one case I had a complete take where I accidentally left something in frame which ruined the take.

All of this was very, deeply frustrating. I lost hours to this stuff at a time in my life when minutes are precious.

But that’s just how life goes, sometimes.

If you spend enough time doing creative work to do anything worthwhile, you’re going to encounter frustrations and wastes of time. For this reason, a man’s ability to make worthwhile creative things is only partially determined by his skill. That’s necessary, of course, but it’s not enough on its own. Equally necessary is the ability to not give up in the face of great frustration.

This is, of course, the lesson of the tortoise and the hare. If life is thought of as a race, it is won, not by whoever happens to be fastest at the moment, but by those who do not give up.

This is also why forgiveness is such a critical skill, particularly being able to forgive oneself. It does matter greatly how often one stumbles and falls so long as one gets up every time. Indeed, the man who gives up the first time he falls will fall only once—and will not finish the race.

It’s also the same idea as Woody Allen’s quip that “80 percent of success is showing up.” It’s not so much showing up the first time that’s hard, but showing up all the time.