Oh Please Persevere
Perseverance according to the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary is the quality of continuing to try to achieve a particular aim despite DIFFICULTIES (emphasis mine). If you are familiar with this blog you will recognise the need to define some of these terms because, you know, we here are not like everybody else so we often need clarification. Added to that is the fact that I find in this definition of perseverance a word we are very familiar with, a word which in itself defines our pervading experience – DIFFICULTY.
Image courtesy The Searcher
Difficulty is a faithful companion of not so smart people. When you are, you know, stupid, difficulty follows you everywhere because your handicap means you don’t know that you need to keep smiling no matter what the truth is. You go all over the place morose and give some of us a bad name when this difficulty is really everywhere.
The wise people invented the word PERSEVERANCE to hide under when they go through DIFFICULTY so why do you make it seem as though this difficulty thing concerns just us?
The point I am trying to make is that since DIFFICULTY is no news to you, you should use it to your advantage!
I’m sure you know a number of endeavours involving a great deal of difficulty you can embark upon. What beats me is why you haven’t jumped at them. It’s not like what you will be experiencing is anything new. But for some reasons you just let opportunities and great ideas pass you by and this really worries me.
The man of virtue makes the difficulty to be overcome his first business, and success only a subsequent consideration.
- Confucius (551BC – 479BC)
Take boxing for instance. This is arguably the highest paying sports and all it entails is enduring a few hard DIFFICULTIES every now and then and you are swimming in millions. Don’t go telling me about all the hard work and training involved because I know some folks like us who passed through that “hard work” and got a chance with Mike Tyson and did not even wait for the impact of the first blow to reach home before hitting the canvas for good. How about that for evidence of hard work and training?
These brothers went home rich and all it took was enduring DIFFICULTY they were already used to.
It may requires a little smartness to fool everybody for a long time about your credentials as an athlete, I can understand that, but you can get around that obstacle by focusing on the DIFFICULTY side of things which you are already familiar with.
Don’t give us a bad name by punching your wives and girlfriends or even wasting the DIFFICULTY engaging in street fights. Just call the process PERSEVERANCE and go through the motions and in no time you are in the ring with some super star and you do like Henry Tillman or Alex Stewart or even Michael Spinks who was knocked out in 91 seconds!
You may decide to stay up and go for it but suicide is something you will never see on these pages.
I have to agree with some smart people who canvass the “hang on” theory of perseverance in reaching a set goal. Just get yourself a coach and go hang on for some years and your chance will come and then you will get the dough needed to start that business.
Do not however be like one brother who has given this constituency a bad name. This brother’s dream has been to play professional football and all his life he has been “working” towards it. He hopes to play for Arsenal and he thinks he is only persevering. This brother is now 46 and still hasn’t realised it’s time he chose another word for a guiding philosophy. Had he become a professional barber all these years he spent training in vain his story would have been different today. He was good at the barbing thing and did it part time to buy his football boots.
What I am trying to say is that if you want to exploit difficulty (let’s just forget about perseverance to avoid confusion), please exploit good, worthwhile and feasible DIFFICULTY. If you don’t like the boxing bit you can enrol in volunteer capacity and lift sacs of grains for the World Food Programme that desperately need helping hands these days, or if you are in Africa just find your way to a major market and practice with sacs of rice and beans, en route to a career in weight lifting.