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Success & Persistance
God Nuggets, Issue 21

"It's rewarding to see your plans and dreams develop. That's why fools refuse to give them up - even when they don't turn out" -Proverbs 13:19

Almost every success book written cites "persistence" or "perseverance" as vital to anyone who wishes to see their dreams become reality. And they are mostly right. After all, if our ancestors gave up after the first few rejections or failures we'd still be living in caves. The history of science, medicine, commerce, the arts, politics, government and religion is a road strewn with failed experiments. If memory serves, it took Edison something like ten thousand experiments before he successfully harnessed the electricity that allows you to receive this email. What if he'd given up on his ten, hundredth, or even one thousandth try?

As any successful athlete, professional, or entrepreneur can tell you - persistence wins the day. However, it's not persistence alone, but persistence combined with other essential attributes. That persistence alone is inadequate is probably evidenced in someone you know, perhaps even one of your relatives. Someone who has relentlessly and single-mindedly pursued their quest (whether personal or professional) with little or no positive results. Countless lives have been squandered while looking for the perfect mate or career, on various crusades that never stood a chance, on failed businesses, careers, or big deals that never came together. So what was missing for many of these very persistent and very dedicated folks?

Let's list the missing components:

• Competence. If you don't know what you're doing, or haven't either inherited or mastered the required skill set it takes to be an artist, minister, crusader, teacher, writer, or business person, persistence will only help you fail more consistently.
  
• Diligence. Not only lots of hard work, but lots of follow-up. Diligence requires the kind of initial research, prioritization, organization, identification, and allocation of resources and strategic planning that will at least provide you with a workable (although not fool-proof) plan.
  
• Pay attention. Here's the big one! If you don't pay attention to the results (feedback from the real world) you're achieving then you can't adjust or modify your plan, tactics, approach, etc. You just keep doing the same thing over and over again expecting to get a different result. That's the definition of insanity.

by CV Doner, PhD

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