The 500 Birds

»It’s the 499 birds before the 1 that works.« (Alexia Sinclair/via)

or, in the words of Jacob Riis:

When nothing seems to help, I go 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. (via)