Time & Perspective Quote by John L. Phillips

Persistence is usually sold as a motivational poster; John L. Phillips frames it as a lifestyle with a timestamp. “I applied for 20 years” is a blunt, almost anti-heroic number: not a montage, not a tidy narrative arc, but two decades of forms, rejections, and recalibration. The line works because it quietly refuses the romance of destiny. Astronauts are often treated like a separate species, born with the right stuff. Phillips turns that myth inside out. Selection isn’t portrayed as a coronation of talent but as a bureaucratic gate that rewards endurance as much as brilliance.

The specific intent feels less like bragging and more like permission. He’s telling you that even the people we think of as elite had long stretches where the dream didn’t “come true” - because institutions don’t validate potential on schedule. The subtext is practical: want something rare? Expect the timeline to be irrational. Keep qualifying yourself anyway.

There’s also a cultural context embedded in the phrasing. NASA’s astronaut corps is famously selective, and the applicant pool exploded across the late 20th century as STEM pathways expanded and spaceflight became both more professionalized and more mythologized. Phillips’ 20-year span implies multiple cycles of career-building - military service, technical expertise, leadership - all while repeatedly volunteering for rejection. The quiet flex isn’t that he got picked. It’s that he kept asking, year after year, without turning the “no” into an identity.