Taking action is essential if you want to achieve your goals, dreams, and desires. To ensure that you stay in action, one of the most important qualities you must develop is persistence.
During your journey to greater success, you will encounter roadblocks, hardships, and challenges. There will be times when you will want to quit, give up, and go back to doing something else. The one quality that will guarantee your success is the willingness to stick with it, to see it through to the end, and to refuse to settle for anything less than your dream.
Be Willing to Pay the Price
Achieving goals and dreams usually requires some level of sacrifice. It might mean putting everything in life on hold in favor of working toward your dreams, investing all of your savings, or giving up a few hours of sleep each night. Many people proclaim to want to achieve their goals, yet are unwilling to pay the price it takes to make their dreams a reality.
No one knows this better than Olympic athletes. According to John Troup, writing in USA Today, “The average Olympian trains four hours a day at least 310 days a year for six years before succeeding. Getting better begins with working out every day. By 7:00 a.m. most athletes have done more than many people do all day.”
Although becoming an Olympic athlete is probably not in your future, you can become world class in whatever you do by putting in the disciplined effort to excel at your profession, craft, or trade.
However, before you can choose to pay the price, you must know what the price is. If you don’t know what will truly be required to make your dreams a reality, investigate what it will take to achieve your desired goals. Research the costs other people have had to pay to achieve dreams similar to yours. You may even want to interview these individuals to discover the sacrifices they had to make along the way.
You may find that some costs are more than you want to pay. Only you can decide what is right for you and what price you are willing to pay.
But if the price is something you are willing to pay, commit yourself to achieving your dream, no matter what it takes. The willingness to do whatever is required is the magic ingredient that helps you persevere in the face of challenges, setbacks, pain, and even personal injury.
Adversity and Discouragement Is Inevitable
No matter how well you plan and how well you execute your plan, you are bound to meet with disappointments, setbacks, and failure along the way to your ultimate triumph. Sometimes, you will encounter what seem like overwhelming odds. At other times, the Universe will test your commitment to the goal you’re pursuing.
Adversity is a great teacher. It gives you the opportunity to develop your inner resources of character and courage, requiring that you learn new lessons, develop new parts of yourself, and make difficult decisions.
Whenever you confront an obstacle or run into a roadblock, brainstorm three ways to get around it, over it, or through it. There are a number of ways that will work, but to find them, you must first look for them.
The longer you hang in there, the greater the chance that something will happen in your favor. No matter how hard it seems, the longer you persist, the more likely your success will be.
As Confucius wrote more than 4,000 years ago in China,
“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
As the beloved originator of the Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, Jack Canfield fostered the emergence of inspirational anthologies as a genre—and watched it grow to a billion dollar market. As the driving force behind the development and delivery of over 100 million books sold through the Chicken Soup for the Soul® franchise, Jack Canfield is uniquely qualified to talk about success. Jack is America’s #1 Success Coach and wrote the life-changing book The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be and speaks around the world on this subject. Follow Jack at www.jackcanfield.com and sign up for his free resources today!
*Photo by Sum_of_Marc.
