Almost There (4 Min Read) | Vol. 199

April 17, 2026

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.” – Calvin Coolidge

Almost There

In 1954, Ray Kroc was a 52-year-old milkshake mixer salesman. He’d spent decades grinding through one middling sales job after another. Then he visited a small burger stand in San Bernardino, California, run by two brothers named McDonald. He saw something no one else did.

Kroc bought the business and built it into the largest fast-food franchise on earth. But here’s the part most people don’t know. Every morning, Kroc would play a recording of the Calvin Coolidge quote above. It was his daily reminder to keep going. He even hung it on the wall of every McDonald’s.

At 52, most people would have called it a career. For Kroc it was a beginning.

The world of business is littered with stories of entrepreneurial “late bloomers” who didn’t quit.

Vera Wang was a figure skater and magazine editor before designing her first wedding dress at 40. Julia Child’s first cookbook came out when she was 50. Colonel Harland Sanders had been a firefighter, streetcar operator, insurance salesman, and gas station owner before franchising his fried chicken recipe at 62. He’d been turned down over a thousand times before finding a partner who believed in him. 

None of them were overnight successes. All of them were “almost there” for a very long time before anyone noticed.

This is Vol. 199 of The TwentyPercenter. Next week is 200. A huge milestone.  I almost didn’t notice. And that’s exactly the point.

In pricing psychology, $199 feels materially cheaper than $200. The difference is a single dollar, but our brains round down. We see the “1” and file it in a completely different mental category than the “2.”

We do the same thing with our progress.

We discount how far we’ve come. We round down our effort. We look at where we are and see the gap instead of how close we are. And then we do something really dangerous – we start over.

The Science of Almost

In 1934, psychologist Clark Hull documented something interesting about rats in a maze. The closer they got to the food at the end, the faster they ran. He called it the “goal gradient effect.”

Decades later, researchers confirmed the same thing in humans. In a 2006 study published in the Journal of Marketing Research, Ran Kivetz and his colleagues tracked customers in a coffee shop loyalty program. The closer customers got to their free coffee, the more frequently they bought. Their effort accelerated as the reward got closer.

Marathon runners experience this, too. Despite total exhaustion, they find a burst of speed in the final mile. The finish line pulls them forward.

But here’s the catch. The goal gradient only works when you can see how close you are.

A coffee card has ten stamps. A marathon has mile markers. But building a business? Raising a family? Mastering your craft? There’s no progress bar for the things that matter most.

Without visible progress, our brains can’t accelerate. So we do the opposite. We coast. We quit. We chase something shiny and new.

This is why the 411 and Goal Setting to the Now matter.

When you work backward from your someday goal to your five-year, one-year, monthly, weekly, and daily targets, you create the progress bar that life doesn’t give you. You can see how close you are. And when you can see it, your brain does what it’s wired to do. It leans in.

This newsletter almost didn’t make it to 199. I’ve thought about quitting dozens of times. Some weeks the blank page wins the first round. I stare at the screen. I wonder if anyone’s reading. I question whether I have anything left to say.

Then I remember Kroc, pushing play on that Coolidge recording every single morning. So I sit down and write.

The discipline to keep going isn’t glamorous. But it’s the whole game. And I’ve learned that the weeks I most wanted to skip were often the weeks you told me mattered most.

You’re closer than you think. Don’t round down.

One question to ponder in your thinking time: What goal am I closer to achieving than I realize?

Make an Impact!
Jay Papasan
Author I CEO I Coach