The Tenacity Tax - Why persistence costs more than motivation ever will, and why it's still the better deal.

A few years ago, on an unremarkable Tuesday night, I sat down at my desk at around ten o'clock to make a start on work nobody had asked me to do. I'd already done a full day at the day job. The house was quiet. There was no deadline, no accountability partner, no one who would have noticed or cared if I'd watched television instead.

I remember that night not because anything happened, but because nothing did. No breakthrough. No sign from the universe. I did the work, went to bed, and got up the next morning to do it all again.

I've come to believe that night — and the hundreds like it — is where everything I've built actually came from. Not the exciting moments. The invoiced ones.

Let me explain what I mean.

Motivation is free. That's the problem with it.

Motivation costs you nothing. It arrives on its own schedule — a podcast on the drive home, a new year, a birthday ending in zero, a moment of frustration that finally tips over into right, that's it, I'm changing everything.

It feels powerful. It is powerful, briefly. But here's the thing about anything that's free and abundant: it doesn't hold value. Everyone you know has been motivated hundreds of times. Most of those moments produced nothing but a gym membership and a notebook with three pages used.

If motivation were enough, everyone would have the life they once got excited about. Look around. Clearly something else is being charged.

Tenacity is a tax

Tenacity is different. Tenacity is what gets levied on you specifically on the days when motivation has left the building — and it always leaves the building. That's not a flaw in you. That's just what motivation does. It's a visitor, not a tenant.

The tax gets paid in small, unwitnessed denominations. The follow-up call when the last three went nowhere. Sitting back down at the work when it isn't working. Showing up on a Tuesday night after a full day, when nobody would notice if you skipped it.

Nobody applauds a tax payment. There's no ceremony. That's precisely what makes it a tax and not a performance. If someone's watching, if there's a crowd, if it feels good — you're probably not paying it yet.

I spent decades in sales and customer service, understanding people and most importantly understanding myself, if that’s even possible. Believe me when I say, I’m not perfect, I’ve been guilty of this myself, and if that world teaches you one thing, it's this: the gap between the people who talk about what they're going to do and the people who quietly do it is not talent. It's not intelligence. It's not even opportunity. It's who keeps paying when the payments stop feeling meaningful.

The invoice is not a sign something's gone wrong

Here's where most people get derailed, and I say this with compassion because I've been most people.

We budget for motivation and get invoiced for tenacity — and we treat the invoice as evidence that something's broken. It shouldn't be this hard. It shouldn't feel this flat. If this were really my path, wouldn't it feel more like the montage?

No. The invoice arriving is the process working. The tax is the price of admission, and the reason so few people get where they say they want to go is not that they can't afford it. It's that they were expecting the journey to be free. When the bill turned up, they assumed there'd been a mistake and walked out.

If you're being taxed right now — if the work has gone quiet and grey and repetitive — you're not off track. You're in the game. The flat stretch is not the detour. The flat stretch is the road.

The tax is unfair at first. Then it flips.

I'll be honest about something the motivational posters won't tell you: in the short term, the tenacity tax is regressive. You pay the most when you can least afford it. Early on, it's full tax and no visible return — all payments, no dividends. That's when almost everyone quits, and if you're only reading this quarter's ledger, quitting right there looks completely rational.

But tenacity compounds, and it compounds into an asset motivation can't buy at any price: a reputation for being the person who is still there.

Still following up. Still building. Still writing. Still showing up on the Tuesday nights. In any field — sales, business, creative work, relationships — the crowd thins out so dramatically over time that simply remaining becomes a competitive advantage. You stop having to beat people. They remove themselves.

I've watched it happen over and over across a long working life. The most gifted person in the room in year one is very rarely the person standing in year ten. The person standing in year ten paid a tax the gifted person refused to.

Let me show you exactly what that looks like, because I lived it.

The seventh name on the list.

Years ago, when I was starting a new business venture, I did what a lot of people do: I bought a list of leads from a marketing company. One hundred names — people who had supposedly raised their hands and expressed interest in exactly the kind of opportunity I was promoting.

The only thing was that it was a non-exclusive list. Plenty of other people had bought the same hundred names, and most of them got there before me.

Before I could even finish my opening line, I was getting abused. “I’m sick of you *** people.”, “I wish I’d never put my name down.”, “STOP CALLING ME!”, “Take my name off your list.”  CLICK.

Well that call didn’t go too well, so I called the second name on the list, “I’m sick of you *** people.”, “I wish I’d never put my name down.”, “STOP CALLING ME!”, “Take my name off your list.”  CLICK.

Righto. I called the third name. Same speech, almost word for word. Click.

The fourth name wasn't interested either, but they'd cooled from furious down to annoyed.

The fifth, less annoyed than the fourth. The sixth wasn't interested but was actually polite about it.

Then I called the seventh name on the list, and they said: "Oh, yes — thank you for getting back to me. I was wondering when someone would call."

Sit with that for a second, because it took me a while.

A whole crowd of people bought the same list I did, paid the same price I did, and called the same first name I did. Enough of them did it that the poor soul at the top of the list had been driven to fury and regretted ever raising their hand. From the temperature of those first few calls, I could read the entire story: most callers never made it past the third name. Fewer made it to the fifth. And not one person before me had ever reached the seventh.

They heard three angry voices, decided nobody on this list is interested, and gave up — probably never bought another list, probably filed the whole thing under "doesn't work."

Me? For the price of a shared list of 100, I ended up holding an exclusive list of 94 names that no one had ever contacted.

That's the tenacity tax in one phone session. Everyone paid the same entry fee. The entire return went to whoever kept dialling after the third click. The list didn't change. The opportunity didn't change. The only variable was who was still on the phone at name seven.

What this looks like in practice

Not dramatic. That's the whole point. Paying the tenacity tax looks like:

Doing the thing on the day it feels pointless, at maybe sixty percent quality, instead of waiting for the day you can do it brilliantly. The sixty percent day counts double, because it's the one that keeps the habit alive.

Measuring yourself on payments made, not results received. Results arrive on their own timetable and it is rarely yours. Payments are the only thing you actually control.

Expecting the invoice. When the flat stretch comes — and it will come, probably next Tuesday — you don't get to be surprised by it anymore. You read this post. You knew.

The real tax

And here's the flip, because the title of this piece is slightly dishonest, and I want to come clean.

The tenacity tax isn't really what persistence costs you. Those Tuesday nights, those unanswered follow-ups, that quiet unglamorous grind — that's not the tax. That's the investment.

The real tenacity tax is what quitting costs you. It's deferred, it accrues interest, and it comes due years later, paid in the most expensive currency there is: what if. What if I'd kept going.

What if I'd made the fifth call. What if I hadn't taken the flat stretch as a verdict.

You're going to pay one of these two bills. Everyone does. The only real decision — the one you make on a quiet Tuesday night when nobody's watching — is which one.

Choose the cheaper tax. It only looks like the expensive one.