Persistence: An Important Ingredient for Success

Written by Lovelyn on June 9, 2009 – 10:39 am -

When I was 16 years old I graduated from high school and started attending college. At the time, people always said, “Wow, you must be really smart!” I always responded by saying, “No, I’m just persistent.”

I’m a quiet, shy person, but I’ve always had persistence going for me. Sometimes I think it might be going against me, because I don’t know when to quit.

My persistence has helped me to achieve some basic goals that I’ve had ever since I was a little girl. I’ve studied and lived in Africa. My original goal was to go to South Africa, but the year I was finally able to go there was too much social unrest in the country so I ended up spending several months in Zimbabwe instead. I also lived and studied in China for a few months. I did all of that before I even turned 20.

Once I graduated from college I taught English in Korea for a few years and traveled around Asia. This was a great experience. I’m still pursuing my goal of seeing the world. I’m currently living in the UK and planning on traveling around Europe.

I’ve been able to do all this because I stick to my goals. Traveling the world may seem like a superficial goal to some, but it’s brought me much enjoyment and taught me tons. I like to live in different countries for a while not just go, see the sites and leave. This gives me a chance to learn the language and customs.

Travel is just one of the goals that I’m quietly working on. There are many others, but this isn’t supposed to be all about me is it. Let’s take a look at persistence, what it is, when is it good or bad and why you might want to have it.

What is Persistence?

Persistence is sticking to your goal even when it’s hard. It guess you could also call it sticktoitness. I’ve written about how when you’re working on a long term goal at times you don’t really want to. Our desires for things ebb and wane so we have to have persistence to accomplish any large long term goal.

When you have persistence you have the where with all to see the ultimate outcome and keep working to get to that outcome no matter what the present may be. Sometimes that’s not necessarily a good thing.

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

Sticktoitness is great because it can help you get to your achieve success. If you look at examples of successful people they all have persistence in common. Having faith that you can achieve your goal and that you can make your plan work an important key to success, but you also need to be able to acknowledge when things just aren’t working out.

When I started blogging a few years ago I started out with another blog. It was a music site that I enjoyed quite a bit. I was sure this blog would be a success. I worked on it daily trying to figure out how I could get more traffic and make the blg better. The problem was that the blog had no traffic. After about a year, I was getting maybe 10 people a day on the blog. It was pitiful. I persevered with this blog for a while, experimenting with different posting schedules and even different types of posts. I used social networking sites to promote it and did all the things you’re supposed to do for a blog. Still no traffic.

Finally, after much thought I decided to give up on the blog. It’s still floating around out there in cyberspace, but I haven’t posted anything on it in a very long time. It just wasn’t working out. Even though I loved the name and the idea, I knew it wasn’t working.

Persistence can turn into just plain hardheadedness if you don’t know when to quit. If you’ve been doing the same thing for years and you’re still not getting results, it’s time to try something else. I tend to be bad at that. I think I let that blog go longer than I should’ve. Writing about it now makes me want to go back to it and post something, but I’ll resist that urge.

Photo by tpuyol

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