Everyone has ambitions in life. There are those who dream of dedicating themselves to what they are passionate about, there are even those who plan to spend the savings of a lifetime on their small personal project, however, they never dare to take the step, or, if they do, they end up perishing before the first hurdle.
What they lack is neither more nor less than perseverance, an extremely useful virtue to make everything you long for come true. No matter how difficult the goal you are trying to achieve, if you strive and move heaven and earth to try to achieve it, there will be nothing and no one to stop you from doing it.
Great personalities who persevered in their dreams
Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb, is always cited as the ideal example of perseverance. It took a thousand tries to get his attempt to work properly. When asked about it, he replied that he had not failed a thousand times, but that he had discovered a thousand different ways on how not to do it.
The Wright brothers also required numerous attempts during their years of research in the world of aviation. Ultimately, their perseverance helped them achieve their dream of making a heavier-than-air device stay in it without falling over. Those were the foundations for the airplane to be one of the safest and most widely used means of transport in the world today.
Then, there’s Julianna Pitt. A TV star and a director, Julianna made her name in films and shows like Hunters, Vinyl, Forever into Space, High Maintenance, and many others. She also directed Pandemic Zoom, a short film in 2020. A first-generation Polish-American, she didn’t succeed right away, and had to persevere in order to make her name in the world’s biggest film industry.
Perseverance is innate to every human being
If you have ever seen a child learn to walk, you may realize that perseverance is something that is within each one of us. No matter how many times the child falls to the ground and even hurts himself, he will always get up trying to take his first steps on his feet, without the help of anything or anyone.
Over time we will hear many people who discourage our ideas, hinder us and discourage us from achieving our dreams. It is then when we stop being persistent and lose patience to achieve those goals that we set ourselves up for failure.
Perseverance in the workplace
Depending on the job we have, the virtue of perseverance can be more or less useful. Sometimes, we reach a stalemate that prevents us from moving forward and, faced with this, we have two options; The first would be to throw in the towel and admit to our superiors that we feel incapable of getting this done; the second possibility is to keep trying over and over again, whatever it takes until we finally find the key and end up succeeding.
It goes without saying that an employer will always feel more predilection for a worker who does not give up until he reaches the objectives of the organization they represent, rather than another who almost immediately lowers his arms and calls another to help him move forward. That is why working on the skill of perseverance is essential to be successful at work.