Positive Perseverance

While persevering is no guarantee of success, there can be no success without it.

Life is hard. Sometimes annoyingly so. I feel like my husband and I have been going through a period of bad luck where things just aren’t going our way. It’s frustrating. But, we stick at it, and keep plugging along working to make things better for ourselves, our family and the world in which we live.

What keeps us going? Well, first, that we don’t have an alternative. Things are what they are and we have no choice but to deal with them. We might as well tackle these things with a positive attitude.

I liken this to my son who hates doing homework and is bored doing it. Whenever he says, I’m bored, I say, so am I, so get the homework done so we can go do something else more fun. Drudgery is a part of life. Get it done and move on and the better the attitude you have about the drudgery, the quicker you get it over with. Fighting it just draws it out.

The next thing that keeps us going is hope.  Hope for the future. Again, we may continue to have bad luck. There is only so much that we can control in our lives. But that shouldn’t stop us from making an effort. There is a lot we can control and by doing those things we improve the possibility that our luck might change. That we may get a break.

An example of this is looking for a new job. There are still way to many people out of work and it doesn’t matter how well qualified you are, you may still lose out on a job to another candidate. Don’t take it personally. My husband lost out on a job a while back that he was actually the top candidate for until another guy lost his job and became available and knocked my husband out of the running. Sometimes things like that happen and sometimes you catch a break. The point is that unless you persevere and keep trying you won’t even be in the running.

For me, the work I do is lonely. I’m a writer. I post stuff and rarely does anyone respond. But sometimes they do and sometimes you find that you had a tremendous impact on someone else’s life. Like yesterday I got a call from a mother who told me that her daughter has become totally empowered because of a book I wrote. If I wasn’t out there persevering despite the lack of positive response, I would not have even met that woman in the first place to have had that impact.

You never know what will come of your efforts. Possibly nothing. But even if that is true, it is still worth it to positively persevere. Because you just never know.

Do you have a story of perseverance you’d like to share? Please share if you do because it will help motivate the rest of us to keep going when the going gets hard.