Intensity Starts the Race. Endurance Finishes It.

One of my business partners handed me Unbroken and said, “Read the book. The movie sucks.
”I’ll be honest, I haven’t read it yet. But I went down the rabbit hole researching the true story, and it’s absolutely insane.

Louis Zamperini was an Olympic runner and a WWII bombardier. His plane crashes in the Pacific. He spends weeks drifting on a raft, starving, hallucinating, watching crewmates die. He survives sharks, exposure, and dehydration. Then he’s captured by the Japanese and spends years in POW camps being systematically beaten and tortured, especially by one guard who makes it his personal mission to break him.

There’s no clever workaround. No hack. No way to speed things up.

He can’t outwork the situation. He can’t force an outcome. The only thing left is endurance.
That’s a different animal than intensity.

Intensity is useful when you can act and push. Endurance is what’s required when time itself becomes the problem. When effort doesn’t pay off quickly. When quitting would actually be understandable.

Business has seasons like that. Projects drag on. Problems don’t resolve. People disappoint you. Momentum dies. And there’s nothing to do except not break.

Most people don’t fail because they’re incapable. They fail because they can’t tolerate prolonged difficulty without reassurance.

Zamperini didn’t win because he was intense.
He won because he endured.

Intensity gets you started.
Endurance is what gets you to the end.