My efforts never go in vain.

Two years of school French, abandoned at sixteen, and then you're in a small restaurant twenty years later reading the menu without any trouble at all. You had assumed every bit of it was gone.

Effort deposits itself in places you have no visibility into. Some of it surfaces decades later, in a situation nobody could have predicted. Some never appears as a skill at all, but shows up as the reason a hard thing now feels manageable. Very little of what you have put in has actually left the building.