Power of Persistence
You have heard it before. At the core of every great man is the ability to persistently follow their dreams. No one will celebrate your achievements until there is proof of persistence. It doesn’t matter whether you are Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther the reformist, lessons in the form of failures are waiting for you.
Failure is the greatest test of persistence. All great people have proved time and time again that persistence done well beats failure hands down. But why does persistence always win? Why can’t a beginning surgeon perform his best surgery immediately after he comes out of school? Why do we try more than once or twice to get what we want? In this article, we go on to understand the reason persistence always works out in the face of failure.
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You will not get it right at the first take
Abraham Lincoln started his first business at the age of 21. At that time, he probably thought his business would ascend him to greatness but it didn’t. Instead, he failed in his business and failed in his next ventures. The world remembers him as the President of the United States but rarely do we know that it took him 31 years to get there since he started his ventures.
When we begin pursuing our dreams, we have a big vision but little knowledge about what is required to actualize it. The first steps towards our dream are a series of guesses and partial knowledge that rarely take us to our desired destination.
Other times we undermine the price it takes to make our dreams come to pass. Undermining the cost of our dreams mostly is unintentional because we have little knowledge concerning the foundational aspects of our vision.
Little knowledge combined with undermining the cost of our visions leads us to assemble limited or the wrong resources for our goal. We become victims of this limitation because we lack the experience of pursuing this goal. It will only take failure for us to understand the real cost of and the right resources to achieve success.
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Life Challenges
No matter how much you prepare, the multidimensional nature of life will challenge you. Humans are limited in their ability to offset life challenges before their occurrence. Health is a factor for success but you can never know when you will be hospitalized or too sick to pursue your dreams.
Health issues will force you to stop pursuing your dreams. Chasing your dreams demands a healthy you. You need to eat, a house to sleep in, and clothes to wear. All these things demand money. Lack of money will make you abandon your dreams to meet life’s basic needs.
The stability of a nation is also foundational for getting to your dreams. You will succeed politically if your country is stable politically. The others, no matter how much they want to pursue their dreams, must wait for the country to stabilize. Some will be forced to leave their dreams and fight for the stability of the nation. We are familiar with cases of farmers and industrial workers who left their jobs and homes to fight the First and the Second World Wars.
Lack of information and knowledge is another life challenge that demands persistence. Every successful man had access to materials and friends with rich information about their desires. Countries in Africa are suffering from poverty, corruption, and insecurity because we are still behind the syllabus started by Western countries.
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You get better as you go.
It is true. You learn more by experience than by theory. You have better details of what you are doing as you do it. Deliberate practice takes you to perfection. It took hours for great men to become masters in their craft. The author of Outlier in his study of Bill Gates and the Beatles, found out that it takes 10,000 hours to become perfect at any skill.
The human brain is not wired to learn a skill at first take. The ability of the brain to learn a skill is subject to myelination, a process that involves strengthening a neural pathway when a brain is learning a skill. The neural pathways become stronger and the signals travel faster as one practices.
Strengthening the neural ways in other terms is memory retention. Retaining something in the memory bans takes muscles built from repetition. Any sequence repeated several times increases the memory strength to the point of doing something automatically.
Humans also learn from feedback. From feedback, we know how people feel about our vision, make adjustments, and determine what to remove. The feedback comes only after we have done something.
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It takes time to form habits
The best metric for success is the person you become more than the money you make. The person you become is a combination of all the habits you develop. It will take persistence to develop the habits required to achieve your dreams.
The brain will choose already-formed habits over creating new habits because it takes energy to form new pathways in the brain and remove old pathways. Forming new pathways starts with a weak connection, which strengthens with time.
It may sound easy but the brain will favor old paths over the path to new habits. We must intentionally develop more strength to weaken previously built pathways and create room for new pathways.
Developing habits for having a successful life is a struggle between dropping old habits and forming new habits, which will demand a lot of persistence for a long time.
Great men, regardless of their time in history, proved that in the face of persistence, failure bends the knee. It takes persistence to beat failure because we do not have the right knowledge, skills, and resources at the beginning stages of our journey. Persistency shows its ability to reign over failure when life challenges such as health, financial, and political situations come our way. The brain’s reluctance to learn new skills and habits and perfecting crafts demand intentional persistence to become a guru.
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