Along your road to success you’ll need courage to push yourself to places that you’ve never been before, to test your limits and to break through barriers. Persistence is a key to living The Richer Life.
Of course, most of our daily activities don’t call for great sacrifice, extreme determination, or all-out persistence. Most of our daily work is steady, calm, sometimes even boring.
Yet when all is said and done, it’s the accumulation of these small daily triumphs that ultimately result in achieving exceptional success in life. Along the way, you’ll find greater and greater opportunities for you to practice being persistent. I have found in my career that being persistent in the small moments of life does help in being persistent when the major moments occur.
Here is a way you can start to practice being persistent. Each day, arise and say aloud, “I am persistent. It is impossible for me to fail.” At first, this may seem strange.
Nevertheless, remember: Your mind completes the picture you put into it.
The successful people I know have learned the eight Ps of success. How about you? Do you know and practice the eight Ps? You should. Here they are:
• Prepare – Prayerfully
• Plan – Purposefully
• Proceed – Positively
• Pursue – Persistently
These eight Ps are extremely important, but those I want to single out are the seventh and eighth Ps, pursue persistently.
From the moment you awaken, whatever activities are itemized on your daily priority list, pursue the completion of these activities persistently. Do not allow yourself to be sidetracked. Stay at it; practice being the most persistent person who ever lived. Preparing prayerfully, planning purposefully, and proceeding positively.
All of these concepts are important; however, they need the clincher to make them complete. The clincher is to pursue persistently.
Prayerfully preparing to be successful, planning to be successful, and proceeding down a determined pathway to success—these are important activities, to be sure, but without persistence a moment will come when your path may be filled with all sorts of difficulty. You will need an extra boost of energy. This is when persistence saves the day. When nothing else will, persistence keeps you moving toward the completion of your goals. As outdated as many think Aesop’s fables are, history proves the turtle can beat the rabbit. As Aesop says, slow and steady wins the race. This is the value of persistence. It keeps on going, and going, and going!
Another example of the value of persistence can be seen in a survey taken by the Retail Dry Goods Association of America. The association discovered that 48 percent of the sales representatives made a single sales call on a prospect and never tried again for a sale.
Twenty-five percent made two sales calls, 15 percent made three sales calls, and 12 percent made four or more sales calls. The sales representatives who made four or more calls, those persistent few, sold 80 percent of all the dry goods sold. Need I say more?
Rick C. Ernst, Ph.D.