Imagine you are given $1,000 to spend any way you want. Rather than spending it on some thing right away, you decide you’re going to invest that money to turn that $1,000 into more money.

Now, you could put it into some “get rich quick” scheme you’ve been seeing on social media, such as a “hot stock” or a multi-level marketing program. Or you could go with something more stable such as a market index fund. (Kids, ask your parents.)

Which do you choose?

If you selected the first option, good luck to you, hope it all works out. It would be nice if you could take that $1,000 and turn it into $10,000 or $50,000 or whatever you think is a lot of money in just a few days.

But the more likely outcome is you not only don’t get that big payoff, you lose the $1,000 you originally had too.

If you selected the second option, you stand a much better chance of getting the type of reward you’re looking for. While any investment opportunity will tell you there is never a guarantee, your odds of success are far higher with the longer-term opportunity – as long as you have the patience to wait for that payoff.

Learning softball skills is much the same way. You take a couple of lessons or you go to a couple of practices and maybe, just maybe, you’ll learn enough to get really, really good really, really fast.

While it’s not impossible (if you’re incredibly gifted as an athlete), it’s highly unlikely.

The more realistic outcome is that not much changes and you’re still just as far behind those players who have been working at it for a long time as you were before. You may even go backwards a little at first because while what you were doing before may not have been ideal, you at least knew how to do it that way.

Now you’re trying to learn a new way to do the same thing and it just may take a while before your body and your central nervous system adapt to the input and can execute it with the same energy and enthusiasm you were bringing before.

Don’t think of that as failure, though. Think of it as investing in your long-term success.

Because if you’re working with the right coach, one day what you’re being taught will suddenly make sense and it will click. What seemed difficult just a little while ago will become easier, and you’ll start to produce the outcomes you were looking for without too much conscious effort.

The key here is patience. Because just like turning your $1,000 into $50,000, getting good at pitching, hitting, throwing, fielding, etc. doesn’t happen overnight.

Instead, it takes a commitment to getting a little better each day as Bobby Simpson likes to say. How many of those days will it take before you see the big payoff?

It’s impossible to say. Every player is on her own journey, with her own sets of abilities and challenges to overcome.

The key is to keep investing in yourself, and not worrying about where you are in comparison to your friends, your teammates, or your peers on other teams. Because comparing yourself to others is discouraging and self-defeating, and just gets in the way of accomplishing your goals.

Instead, focus on what you can control, which is the effort you’re putting into yourself, and one happy day in the future you will find that you’re more than capable of competing with them anyway.

And if you’re a parent or a coach, share this post with a player who needs to hear this so they can understand why in a world of “get rich quick” schemes it really pays to make a longer-term investment in themselves.