You look out of the window at the life waiting for you, and you want to succeed in it.
You want to flourish. To thrive. To love over time.
And you understand that for all of these you will need persistence. A great deal of it.
Good for you. You have learned the wisdom of the elders by heart: without endurance there are no achievements.
But if it were that simple, why is it that we do not all persist and succeed?
This is not only a question of physical strength. It is a question of understanding. Or rather, of a failure of understanding. There is something very, very basic that people do not grasp about the nature of persistence.
Here is what we do not grasp. Persistence has nothing to do with the test of the outcome.
That does not sound very clear, and not even very intuitive, I admit. It was drilled into our heads in primary school that if you make an effort you can achieve anything you want. Which is untrue, incidentally — there is also such a thing as potential.
Persistence is not connected to the result. It occurs separately from it.
Now comes an example, and immediately after it an explanation.
Suppose you are a fairly young human being, under thirty, and someone offered you the following deal. Every Monday and Thursday you get up at dawn, travel to a town three hours away, arrive by eleven in the morning at a flat on the second floor, and clean it thoroughly. When you return home, an envelope containing three thousand dollars will be waiting for you on the chest of drawers in your room.
You know what? It is likely that most of you would take that deal with both hands and persist in it.
Why? Because it is no great feat to persist at something with devotion and faith when the positive outcome is guaranteed.
And this is the introduction to the mental bug that causes young people to miss their own lives again and again. It is such a broken working assumption, and such a common one, that it is worth repeating:
It is no great feat to persist at something with devotion and faith when the positive outcome is guaranteed.
Real persistence is what you do when nobody has promised you the envelope. When the flat might be empty when you arrive. When there is a reasonable chance that all of this leads nowhere at all.
That is the only kind that counts, and it is the only kind that is hard.