Persistence
No matter how brave or prepared you are, you will fail on occasion. Bravery allows you to begin tasks that might end in failure and to accept the result, but without persistence you will never turn failures around and your life be marked by too many unfulfilled goals. If you have the ability to be persistent (and the wisdom to know when you should stop), your life will be well improved.
No matter how brave or prepared you are, you will fail on occasion. Bravery allows you to begin tasks that might end in failure and to accept the result, but without persistence you will never turn failures around and your life be marked by too many unfulfilled goals. If you have the ability to be persistent (and the wisdom to know when you should stop), your life will be well improved.
When you fail to get the better job you want, fail to get meet a partner, fail on a personal project, or any other goal, you need to develop the ability to try again until you get it right. Think of this as a more specialized form of bravery. For example, it might be frightening to try to start a conversation, but a really brave person will have the courage to try it a second time if it didn't work out.
Another aspect of persistence is habit. You might be very brave but not show much persistence—it might just never occur to you that you might succeed if you did it again! Writers get a huge list of rejection slips before they get published. Lovers get tons of rejections before they find someone that wants to be with them. People with good jobs were turned down at many interviews before they were hired. Rejection is a part of life, so don't think that if you are rejected once or even repeatedly that something "just wasn't meant to be." You must develop the attitude that you can succeed at your goals—just make sure you develop your skills, learn from your failures, and always give it your all.
One last note about persistence is that you will have to give up on occasion, and sometimes goals will be inappropriate for you or someone else. You might have to put off a goal for a year (make sure to pick it up again!). Your attempt at friendship or flirting might not be reciprocated—and in these cases persistence might turn to harassment if you're not careful! And sometimes it really will be too late, and you will have to learn to be happy with (and improve upon) what you have.
Here are some activities that will help you be persistent:
Activities
- Every time you feel humiliated from a failure, get yourself away to somewhere you are alone and feel secure, and then remind yourself that rejection is a part of life. Imagine yourself being brave and successful in your next attempt so your failures don't drag you down and hurt your performance.
- Whenever you make an important goal, you can make a journal just like if you were making a journal for a virtue. For every time you fail to take an opportunity to try again, you mark it as a "fault"!
- Every time you fail at a goal that is important to you, evaluate what happened and what went wrong. Then do something different each subsequent time you try it again. You might need to come up with another approach or do some research, but when you are successful with your persistence, you will get the encouragement you need to persist throughout your life!
Your Record
Every time you miss a clear opportunity to try again, you mark that as a "fault". If you avoid failure or procrastinate on a task that requires you to retry or fix something you failed at, mark that as a fault. When you focus on this trait, make some goals with the activities above as a reference. If you fail to meet your goals or complete the exercises, you mark a fault for the day.
Opinions
Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.
Calvin Coolidge, American PresidentNo great achievement is possible without persistent work.
Bertrand Russell, English PhilosopherWhat do you first do when you learn to swim? You make mistakes, do you not? And what happens? You make other mistakes, and when you have made all the mistakes you possibly can without drowning - and some of them many times over - what do you find? That you can swim? Well - life is just the same as learning to swim! Do not be afraid of making mistakes, for there is no other way of learning how to live!
Alfred Adler, Austrian psychiatristGolden Mean
Recommended Reading
Stick to It! : The Power of Positive Persistence
This book offers a collection of essays that can be quickly read for inspiration towards your persistence and daily life.
General Rules
Practice virtues daily so that they become ‘habits of the heart’.
Don‘t strive for perfection.
Never give up! Remember: even the greats have off days.
Rely on your intuition.
Avoid extremes. Strive to achieve the golden mean between excess and deficiency of a virtue.
Have fun and enjoy the program with humor and optimism.