My running coach told me that if I wanted to run a marathon all I had to do was to show up at practice. In sweats, not in heels. And the guys who had been sober for double digits said it too: “Keep showing up to these meetings, and you won’t drink.”

Success is 99 percent perspiration, even as I’d like it at times to be a result of luck or fate, or some no-brainer thing. Alas, most great achievements–and chasing sanity day in and day out is an act of nobility deserving of a Purple Heart–are accumulated moments of bravery and perseverance gone mostly unnoticed. It’s the stuff of every day. Winston Churchill is right: “The heights of great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight. But they, while their companions slept, were toiling upwards in the night.”