Quote of the Week

Perseverance

"Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time." ~ Thomas A. Edison

Another, more modern, way of saying this is, “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” Sometimes it takes just one last try to achieve our goal. Sometimes it takes a dozen or more. But if that goal is important to us, if it matters, then perseverance is a necessary component of success. If we quit on something we want, we’ll never get it.

To be clear, I’m not talking relationships here. That’s another kettle of fish because another person and their emotions, their baggage, is involved and is best left for another discussion. I’m talking about personal goals. Running a 5k, a marathon. Reading all of Shakespeare’s works. Writing a book.

That last one, writing a book––it took me seven years to write my first one. There’s a story there, but my point is that I kept trying. I kept learning about the craft, kept rewriting the book using what I learned until one day I had a whole story with all the unnoticed parts that make a story good. And then I kept going because I discovered a love for story telling.

Did I think about giving up during those seven years? Get discouraged at how hard it was? You bet. But I wanted this. I wanted to succeed. I persevered. And now I’m a bonafide professional writer with more than two hundred short stories and forty novels under my belt.

Perseverance for the win.