I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years,” Steve Martin recalls in his 2007 memoir, Born Standing Up. “Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success.” If you do the math, this sums to fourteen years of hard work before Martin saw returns on his investment.
You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” - Eleanor Roosevelt