Dr. Chris DeRienzo
What if the most transformative leadership trait wasn’t charisma, brilliance, or strategy — but perseverance?
Dad. Husband. Physician. Author. Mediocre Triathlete.
Everyone applauds at the starting line and the finish line. I like to focus on the miles in between, where applause fades, fatigue sets in, and real leadership happens. I explored these ideas in my first book Tiny Medicine. Now I write about them in The Perseverance Playbook, a weekly LinkedIn newsletter on perseverance, purpose, and what it takes to keep going when nobody’s watching.
Recent Editions of The Perseverance Playbook
-
Where the Bullet Holes Aren’t
The Perseverance Playbook | Ed. 55 In the defining days of 1943, Allied bombers grinding through flak over Europe were taking a beating from Nazi fire. The U.S. military wanted to add armor to better protect the crews but armor is heavy, so the question of where to add it landed with the Statistical Research…
-
The Arena, Part 1: Mile 85
The Perseverance Playbook | Ed. 49 In April of 1910 Theodore Roosevelt stood at the Sorbonne in Paris and delivered a long speech he called “Citizenship in a Republic.” Most of it is rarely quoted, but one passage has landed on everything from posters to coasters. It’s about the man in the arena: It is…
-
One More
What Desmond Doss teaches us about knowing who you are before the test arrives.
-
The Bark, the Roots, and the Lightning
A thousand-year-old redwood becomes the frame for understanding how leaders should balance speed with depth in the age of AI.
-
The Rust is the Receipt
A rusted shovel becomes a meditation on dependability, multigenerational transmission, and the difference between being optimized for one thing and being reliable across many.
-
The Seventh Call
Angela Duckworth’s grit research meets a chaotic travel day with his son John, and the simple act of making one more phone call becomes a parable about persistence.
