A good habit to give up – giving up!

What if you never gave up on anything? What if giving up was not an option? How much could we achieve?

When I was young, I wasn’t taught perseverance. I was taught, unwittingly, that it was okay to give up. Nobody make me finish certain things or taught me how to overcome my fears. I didn’t learn deep down that I could make myself succeed if I just – gave up on giving up.

Countless unfinished projects litter my history, coupled with neat little stacks of regret. This craft project, that puzzle, this video game, that story, that class project, that fear…

I find myself tempted to self castigate. As if that helped anyone achieve anything! So I try to resist that temptation. Instead, I remind myself that being persistent isn’t so hard – if you take it one step at a time, one more try, one more little wiggle forward. If you fall down, get back up. It’s okay to fail. Learn from every failure and eventually you fill find success.

Winston Churchill famously said “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.”  He should know, he had a lot of struggle in his life on his way to success and he never stopped trying – even though he wasn’t always dealt the best hand.

Here are some other great quotes about perseverance!

“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.”

-Winston Churchill

 

“The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.”

– Amelia Earhart

 

“Look at a stone cutter hammering away at his rock, perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred-and-first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not the last blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”

– Jacob A. Riis

“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

– Albert Einstein

“A failure is not always a mistake. It may simply be the best one can do under the circumstances. The real mistake is to stop trying.”

 – B. F. Skinner

“Let me tell you the secret that has led to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.”

 – Louis Pasteur