Perseverance is indeed an important ingredient for success. But just how does one go about acquiring persistence?
Thomas Edison owed his success to 3 secrets, wrote Randy Gilbert, motivational speaker and author of Success Bound. These three secrets are said to be able to make you truly unstoppable in any pursuit.
Secret No 1:
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You must fail systematically without labelling yourself a failure. Every failure you encounter means that you are getting closer to finding a solution that would work. |
Secret No 2:
Don't be lazy thinker and know that having a positive attitude empowers you. When many of us try to solve a problem we come up with the requisite 2 or 3 alternative solutions. If all 3 don't work, we give up. Maybe the 4th idea would have worked; but we will never know because we were too lazy to think of it.
Thomas Edison didn't stop at 3 alternatives, or 4 or 5. And he didn't even stop at 10,000. Was each of those 1,000 experiments exactly the same? No. Each was slightly different as he tried new ideas and methods of achieving his desired result.
Through continued improvements in his methods, he achieved his success.
Secret No 3:
Aim to become a positive feeler and use proactive thinking techniques. One way is to take a piece of paper and write at the top of it your pressing problem. Then number the lines 1 through 20.
Write on each line one way of how you might solve the problem. The first few will come fairly quickly and seem obvious; just put them down. You will begin to experience more difficulty as you work on the last 5 to 7. Often these are the ideas with the most promise.
This way, when you have a solution that doesn't work out, you'll be able to look at the situation in the way that Thomas Edison did and congratulate yourself for finding another way that didn't work.
More importantly, you will have gained an attitude of proactive persistence.
"Thomas Edison was once asked by a reporter, when he reached experiment number 9,999: 'Sir, are you going to fail 10,000 times?'
Edison confidently replied, 'I have not failed at each attempt; rather I've succeeded at discovering another way not to invent an electric lamp.'"
