Nineteen years

Su Wu was sent as an envoy to the Xiongnu in 100 BCE. A rebellion broke out, he was implicated, and they demanded he submit.

They tried the usual sequence. First a sword against his throat, expecting him to panic. He walked into the blade. They stopped him, because a dead envoy is useless. Then they starved him in a pit, and he ate the snow mixed with his own cloak lining and survived for several days.

Then they offered him a title, a vast property, goods, and a wife. They gave him a herdsman's post and sent him to the frozen north to look after rams, saying that when the rams produced milk he could go home.

He lived there for nineteen years. He ate what he could find, kept the emperor's envoy staff with him, and eventually the hair on it wore off completely.

Eventually he got back to Chang'an with nineteen years in him. He was old. Most of the people in his household were gone.

The standard version is about loyalty to a dynasty, which makes it easy to dismiss. But strip that off and it's about duration: he accepted a life's wreckage as the price of one thing he wouldn't surrender.

The useful question for us is smaller. What would you refuse, if the price of refusing was the next nineteen years? Not a form of words, an actual thing you wouldn't do for money.

Most people have never priced it. That's why the line gets crossed by accident.

MOJOWAY asks that question explicitly and writes the answer down. Once written, the line is expensive to move.