Not every collapse comes with a headline. Sometimes it’s not a single moment but a slow erosion — years of grinding, chasing, pushing… until the weight finally cracks you from the inside.
For athletes, founders, and honestly anyone chasing something bigger than themselves, determination isn’t about the highlight reel. It’s not the roar of the crowd or the champagne celebration. It’s persistence in silence. It’s “one foot in front of the other” without a finish line. And more than anything? It’s patience.
That lesson resurfaced in my conversation with Steve Wheatcroft on Two Types of People.
His story resonated because it’s not about instant wins. It’s about staying in the game when almost everyone would’ve folded, even when the dream feels impossibly far away.
When Determination Meets Patience
Steve didn’t immediately chase the dream. In fact, at one point, he thought the odds of owning a Chick-fil-A on the moon were better than making it as a professional golfer. But little by little, step by step, he began to believe it could happen. That belief carried him through the mini tours, through the lean years, and eventually onto the PGA Tour.
What stood out most to me wasn’t just the achievement — it was the patience. The patience to grind when a single stroke meant going home early. The patience to swing again after knowing the last shot might have cost him his livelihood. The patience to endure years of waiting while still doing the work.
Most people picture determination as fire and fury. But Steve reminded me it’s something else entirely: patience that feels like suffering. The kind of patience I’ve learned as an entrepreneur, as a husband & father, as an Ironman & Ultra-endurance athlete— the discipline to keep going when the pain sets in and the finish line is still miles away.
Determination, at its truest, isn’t a spark. It’s the steady current that keeps you moving when everything else says stop.
The Trap of Forcing It
There’s a fine line between determination and forcing it. Forcing it is trying to make results happen before they’re ready. It’s swinging harder because you need something to happen. It’s gripping tighter, trying to control the uncontrollable. And in golf, in business, in life — forcing it almost always makes it worse.
Steve told me straight: golf punishes forcing it. The more you force, the tighter your grip, the faster the unravel.
With Adaptive, The Determined Society, and even the process of launching the entire Two Types of People project, I’ve felt the urge to force it — to try and make timelines move faster, to push the breakthrough. But the truth is, the breakthroughs never come that way. They come after patience. They come when you’ve put in the work long enough that the door finally creaks open.
The Grit Nobody Sees
One of my favorite parts of Steve’s episode wasn’t about the big moments on the Tour. It was about the grind behind the scenes.
The travel. The missed family time. The endless hotel rooms and the pressure of knowing every shot could be the difference between staying on Tour or packing up. That isn’t sexy. It’s not Instagram-worthy. It’s lonely. It’s heavy. And most people will never see it. And it definitely will not be celebrated or recognized.
But here’s the truth: work unseen is the “special sauce”.
Founders know this. Leaders know this. Elite Athletes know this. Anyone who’s walked through fire long enough to reach a dream knows this. Everyone celebrates the stage moment. Very few celebrate the silent years of patience and persistence that made it possible.
My Lens: Building in Silence
Adaptive has been 11 years of riding waves of career-defining moments mixed with “invisible” stretches where it felt like nobody noticed, and nobody cared.
The Determined Society started as a Facebook Group and Shawn French talking into his phone in his car. Then recording on a webcam in his guest room. Now we’re a chart topping podcast that reached #2 Trending on Spotify and #4 in Lifestyle & Culture on Apple.
People see the ranking. Few understand the patience it took to get there, or the daily struggle to keep it moving forward.
Determination Isn’t Loud
Steve talked about what it feels like when the thing that wasyour identity suddenly collapses. For him, it was golf. For me it was baseball first, then multiple other roles and titles I’ve had to mourn the loss of.
You can either spend your life trying to claw back the old identity, or you can make space to see what’s ahead. But making space requires pressure & patience. Determination isn’t loud. It’s quiet. It’s the decision you make in the dark to keep showing up. To keep swinging. To keep building.
The Beam Forward
Steve’s story is proof that patience is the central currency in a world that values flashes over slow burns. Because action without patience is just exhaustion—and patience without determination is just waiting. Together, they make something real.
My friend Jason Kuhn(former Navy SEAL Sniper, elite performance coach, and one of the voices in TToP) has certainly walked this territory. In his work, he teaches that pressure isn’t the enemy. The moment you try to force a breakthrough, the system resists. You crack. You break. You waste. But when you lean into it—doing the tiny, hard things day after day, even when nothing seems to change—you build callused character. You turn pressure into presence.
I’m reminded of the Jocko clip “Good”—he says when everything is going wrong, you say “Good.” Because every failure, every setback, every blowback is fuelif you let it be. It’s the raw medicine that forges the new you.
So here’s what every story in the book and from the show so far have stated clearly:
If you hold your fire steady—in silence, in the deep climb, with no guarantee, but you can remember why you started in the first place—then one day folks are going to see the light behind the work. Success doesn’t always announce itself. Most times it sneaks in under the radar, but at the exact moment it is supposed to.
Your job is to endure long enough.
Don’t quit before the miracle happens.
👉 Full episode here: Steve Wheatcroft on The Two Types of People