The mountain that takes generations

Two mountains called Taihang and Wangwu, seven hundred miles in diameter and tens of thousands of feet high, used to block the road out of the north of Jizhou.

An old man named Yu Gong, ninety years old, lived facing them. He gathered his family. These mountains are in our way. Let's dig through them and get to the road.

His wife said: you can't even clear a hill of soil, what will you do with Taihang and Wangwu.

He started anyway. Led his sons and grandsons, carrying baskets of dirt down to the Bohai Sea. It was a whole season for one trip.

A neighbour's widow had a son who was just cutting his teeth, and he jumped up and went along with them.

A man called Zhi Sou mocked the old man. You're ancient, added nothing, you're already near the end of your strength. What are you digging for?

Yu Gong said: when I die my son goes on, my son has grandsons, their grandsons have sons. The children keep coming, but the mountain doesn't grow. So how much more digging do we need?

The heavenly emperor heard about this and moved the mountains himself.

Most retellings stop at persistence. What catches me is the arithmetic in that answer. The argument was structural. He wasn't optimistic about the timeline, he was just showing the two curves never reverse.

You don't have to see the end. You have to be in the part of the plan where you're still digging.

MOJOWAY keeps a file for the long version of a person, not just next week's problem. Growth that lasts is built on the same arithmetic.