While serving as Police Commissioner of NYC, Theodore Roosevelt once called Jacob Riis “the most useful citizen of New York.” Riis was a police reporter for the New York Tribune, where he photographed and wrote about NYC’s worst slums; as a result, he became a prominent social reform advocate.
His success in producing substantial, albeit arduous, reforms is what prompted Roosevelt to make his affirming observation.
Riis may best be known, however, for The Stonecutter’s Creed, a mantra which he often espoused, and which undoubtedly facilitated his own success. It reads:
When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
The Stonecutter’s Creed reminds us that having passion for a goal is not enough to master it. We must also learn to persevere in the mundane, unremarkable, and sometimes difficult tasks related to reaching our goals. Said another way, we must learn to love the gutter work as much as or more than the glitter work.
The Stonecutter’s Creed teaches us to love the process of stone pounding because it’s the whole process that contributes to the success of the one final blow that splits the stone in two.
In other words, it’s the consistency of having written every day that eventually produces The Great American novel. It’s the musician’s steady and sure practice of his scales that gives way to the Magnum Opus. It’s the regular small deposits into one’s savings or investment that multiplies wealth.
Those who only love the product of mastery will seldom achieve their goals successfully. But those who learn to love the process of mastery will.
“Seest thou a man diligent in his business? He shall stand before kings; He shall not stand before mean men.” –Proverbs 22:29
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