Perseverance: Just because it hasn’t happened yet…
I was back in school today, teaching a juicing workshop for 7 and 8 year-olds. One thing that really struck me with the children was how they have been learning about (and have a clear understanding of) perseverance.
It is amazing to hear kids talk about how if things aren’t working now, the only word they really need to focus on is yet. It’s not that somethings not working, it’s just that it’s not working yet.
I once heard a saying, that it all works out in the end, and if it hasn’t worked out, then it’s not the end.
It was so refreshing to see a whole class of children who’ve embraced the idea of perseverance. The idea that just because you haven’t achieved something, it doesn’t mean you’re not going too.
There is no such thing as failure
When something doesn’t work the first time, it’s not failure. It’s not a reason to give up. It just means it is not working yet.
Why is it that so many people, as soon as they get one little setback, they view it as failure? There’s no need to do that, there’s no need to view it as failure at all, it just means that you haven’t got the result or the outcome you wanted yet! Stop calling it failure. It’s not failure, it’s research.
The Importance of Research
Every time you try something as it doesn’t work, you are doing research. You are finding out one more way that doesn’t work, that’s it.
If you were trying to do a maze, every time you get to a stop in a maze, every time you get to a wall in a maze, a block, what do you do, you go backwards and you try another way. And if you hit another block, you go backwards and you try another way.
Eventually you find the way out, eventually you find the way forward, eventually you find the way to where it is you’re trying to get to. Why does life have to be any different?
Why is it in life that it’s so easy to give up whenever you reach a wall? If it was a simple maze as a child, what did you do? Did you keep going until you found a way out? Perhaps sometimes you found a nonconventional way out, like climbing over the damn wall, but you found a way.
Don’t get caught in the maze. Find your way out, find your way to achieve the outcomes you desire in life.
