Perseverance

Perseverance gives a next attempt with something to learn

Your football passes keep rolling beyond the small target gate. At first you blame the gate for being unnecessarily narrow. Then you look at where the balls have actually gone. On the next suitable practice day, you work with a simpler target and one point you can attend to. It is less impressive than the drill you imagined filming. For the first time, you can tell what changed between attempts.

Finding the balance in Perseverance

After repeated unsuccessful passes, a player returns to a simpler practice that makes a particular difficulty easier to understand.

Perseverance is most useful when each return can remember what happened last time.

What Perseverance makes possible

An adjusted attempt makes improvement more intelligible, though it cannot guarantee a result. You may discover that a different role, level or form of the sport offers a better place for the interest you wanted to keep. The continuity lies in attending to something worthwhile. It need not lie in defending every detail of your original ambition.

Perseverance in ordinary life

After selection

You trained for a place and were not selected. Let the disappointment settle before examining the feedback and deciding whether another trial, another team or a changed goal deserves the next effort.

An interrupted season

A return can begin from your present circumstances rather than from the standard you once expected to meet.

Nearby virtues, different work

Diligence

Diligence sustains care within the work; Perseverance returns to worthwhile work through setbacks.

Temperance

Temperance gives effort a fitting measure so that continuing does not consume everything else.

Perseverance and its counterfeits

Never changing course

An unchanged goal can be loyalty to an old self-image rather than to what remains worthwhile.

The inspirational shortcut

A stirring sentence cannot replace access, instruction, time or appropriate support.

How to cultivate Perseverance

1. Separate the disappointing outcome from the information the attempt supplied.

2. Choose one reason for returning and one adjustment worth testing.

3. Review the cost as honestly as the hoped-for benefit.

Try it today

Recall a sporting setback. Name what you learned and whether another attempt, an adjusted goal or a pause makes sense now.

Questions worth returning to

• What would make another attempt informative?
• Am I continuing because I value the activity or because stopping would embarrass me?

Keep the practice proportionate

Persistence does not require exercising through pain, ignoring care advice, accepting abuse or spending money you cannot spare. Changing a goal can be the considered outcome of perseverance.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. Before I hit my stride on this trip the French sporting papers berated the promoters of the races which featured me, saying the public had rather remember me as I was in 1903 instead of the slowed-up rider I appeared in my first few starts this year. However, my managers had the last laugh when I finally arrived at my best form, and the newspapers were profuse in their apologies for rushing at their hasty conclusions.

   Marshall W. “Major” Taylor · The Fastest Bicycle Rider in the World · Chapter 91

   Taylor recalls the hostile judgments that greeted his return after a three-year absence. The newspapers later apologized: their first report of a comeback was not its final account.

2. That which made me succeed with the bicycle was precisely what had gained me a measure of success in life—it was the hardihood of spirit that led me to begin, the persistence of will that held me to my task, and the patience that was willing to begin again when the last stroke had failed.

   Frances E. Willard · A Wheel within a Wheel · The Process

   Willard connects continuing with beginning again after an unsuccessful attempt. What carries forward is the purpose and attention, rather than a demand to repeat the same movement unchanged.

3. Once, when I grew somewhat discouraged and said that I had made no progress for a day or two, my teacher told me that it was just so when she learned: there were growing days and stationary days, and she had always noticed that just after one of these last dull, depressing, and dubious intervals she seemed to get an uplift and went ahead better than ever.

   Frances E. Willard · A Wheel within a Wheel · The Process

   Willard’s teacher recalls intervals when learning seemed stationary. The reassurance is grounded in a shared experience; it offers patience without proving that every stalled pursuit must eventually succeed.

4. All great things are slow of growth; nay, this is true even of a grape or of a fig. If then you say to me now, I desire a fig, I shall answer, It needs time: wait till it first flower, then cast its blossom, then ripen.

   Epictetus · The Golden Sayings of Epictetus · Saying XXXIX · Hastings Crossley translation

   The fig-tree analogy occurs in advice about a difficult relationship with a brother. In sport it can remind us that growth takes time, while neither a reconciliation nor a victory can be forced by waiting alone.

5. When you begin to play games, do not try all the strokes that you see made. Begin by playing quietly in the back of the court.

   James Dwight · Lawn-Tennis · How to Learn to Play

   Dwight asks the beginner to narrow the task before multiplying strokes. A simpler return can be a serious continuation of effort, rather than an embarrassing retreat.

6. Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make, and on every emotional prompting you may experience in the direction of the habits you aspire to gain.

   William James · Talks to Teachers and to Students · The Laws of Habit

   James brings a resolution down to an occasion for action. Once a player has identified a change worth trying, the next attempt can give that intention a concrete form.

7. …but when thou hast condemned it, do not despair of thyself—be not like them of mean spirit, who once they have yielded, abandon themselves entirely and as it were allow the torrent to sweep them away.

   Epictetus · The Golden Sayings of Epictetus · Saying CLVI · Hastings Crossley translation

   Epictetus separates acknowledging a failure from abandoning oneself. A disappointing attempt can be examined without letting it settle the value of every future effort.

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