A goal planted clearly in the imagination keeps its own schedule. The success mechanism inside a person works toward the pictured end the way a homing device tracks its target, quietly, without announcing each correction. Nothing seems to move for a long stretch, and the mind reads that silence as failure, when the silence is only the mechanism doing its work below the surface.
The mental picture does not lie. It holds its shape and arrives on its own clock, not the anxious one that begs for proof by morning. When a person stops jerking the wheel at every delay, the pull toward the goal steadies. What was pictured with steady faith finally shows up as fact, and the waiting turns out to have been the work.