But all that had gone before

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbtBRvqAFPA&t=9

“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

https://ifthewindgoeswhereyousendit.tumblr.com/post/626737081356550144/jaehaerys1-when-nothing-seems-to-help-i-go-and