Tenacity
Louis Pasteur
Amelia
Earhart called fear “a paper tiger.” And said that the hardest part of any
undertaking is “the decision to act.” I agree with her. When there is something
I need to do, but am resisting, I can find a million ways to distract myself
and procrastinate. Indecision grips us when we are afraid of an outcome; when
we can’t control an outcome, and most of the time, we can’t. So, we dilly-dally—at
least, I do.
Look at
this little wildflower. Growing in a crack in the road is not something it ever
thought about, never wrestled with or obsessed over. It just settled into the
crack, put down roots and reached for the sun. It even bloomed! We could take a
lesson from that. Because humans are always striving for something else, they
miss the potential and the pleasure that exists right now, right here, in this
crack in the road; and too often we fail to bloom because of it.
The
other thing we seem not to realize as we’re speeding toward the next thing, is
that the process itself is the reward. We climb the ladder with great urgency
only to discover that the reward is not at all what we thought it would be.
That’s the control issue—when the outcome does not match our expectation, we’re
enormously disappointed and discouraged. All that work, all that striving, and for
what? When we fail to recognize that the process is the important part, we
entirely miss the reward.
According
to Amelia Earhart, and a lot of behavioral scientists, the most important
factor in human success or failure is not raw intelligence, but grit, tenacity.
Persisting in the face of frustration and failure, trying again, refusing to
give up—these traits lead to success in almost any life pursuit.
If you
want to know how to succeed, just ask this tenacious little daisy—oh, wait, it’s
busy making seeds. Give it a day or two.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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