Persisting in Persistence

Dear lovely people,

There are tons of motivational articles, quotes, videos, conferences, workshops and you name them. Sometimes I wonder if these just entertain most of the audiences or they actually take the time to let what they listen to or read to permeate their beings thus setting up a transformational process that will be translated into their actions and thus move them forward.

I have read a lot about persistence and I am sure you have too. Some to the times when I think of persistence, I think of Thomas Edison. A one point in history, a partially deaf four year old teen-ager came home with a note in his pocket from his teacher, “Your Tommy is too stupid to learn, get him out of the school.” His mother read the note and answered, “My Tommy is not stupid to learn, I will teach him myself.”

What a laudable commitment she took. But trust me, such a commitment is as good as you are ready to take consistent action and persisting in the face of all difficulties. I mean ALL difficulties. That is exactly what Tommy’s mother did and guess what? Tommy grew up to become the great Thomas Edison who created such great innovations as the electric light bulb and the phonograph. He was such a savvy businessman who held more than a 1,000 patents for his inventions.

Would all of that have been possible if Tommy himself did not commit to learning from his mother to make that dream come true? Certainly not. It is not as if after taking the commitment, everything suddenly became smooth with no sweat, far from it. Thomas Edison and mother certainly had to go through unthinkable challenges including the fact that he had only three months of formal schooling and he was partially deaf.

So what do you take home to encourage you on your own path to success? Notice clearly that Thomas Edison succeeded in spite of problems, not in the absence of them. But to the outside world, it appears as though he just got lucky. Here then is the hard fact, “Successful people don’t do great things, they only do small things in a great way.”

All success stories are actually stories of great failures. The only difference is that every time they failed, they bounced back. This is called failing forward, rather than backward. You learn and move forward. Learn from your failure and keep up your persistence.