Perseverance and Self-Discipline

The following is an extract of my upcoming e-book on developing self-discipline and understanding willpower: The Discipline Manifesto: Overcoming Procrastination and Harnessing Willpower in 5 Steps. The e-book will be available FREE for a limited period prior to its launching. If you want to grab a copy just subscribe to theGoodVader Newsletter at the bottom of this page or to the waiting list here!

“Permanence, perseverance and persistence in spite of all obstacles, discouragements, and impossibilities: It is this, that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak.” – Thomas Carlyle

Defining Perseverance

Perseverance is the firm continuance on a course of action in spite of difficulty or failure, and one of the five principles of self-discipline.

Big goals require self-discipline and willpower. But no matter how much planning we do, there is always a latent possibility that an unforeseen setback shows up. It could be an unexpected event that we couldn’t have predicted, or a personal trait or belief that we ignored about ourselves and now stands in our way to success. Perseverance is what will allow you to continue on your drawn path despite the presence of setbacks. Without perseverance, we would quit after the first failure.

Imagine that the Coyote gives up on chasing the road runner after the first flop. He might not be the smartest cartoon character, but that coyote was one perseverant fellow.

Make It Better

Perseverance is fed on results. The better and more results you are able to acknowledge, the more perseverant you will be and you will be willing to invest more energy and time into a given task or goal.

Every action, even the ones that lead to failure, yield results. The key point is to learn to see the positive results out of such actions and take note of every single one. I know that when we fail there is nothing more annoying that someone telling us that our failure was a “learning experience”, but I am here to say to your face that every failure it is a learning experience. And a highly underrated one, I may add.

The next time you fail while trying to accomplish a goal, sit down with paper and pen, or in front of a text processor, and list every single thing you have learned between the moment you decide to tackle this particular task or goal, and the time you failed. List every single thing that comes to mind, short or long, whether it can be summarized in a word, a sentence or you need a whole paragraph to put it out; whether is something you learn about yourself or about others. After you feel there is nothing more you could pour onto the paper, or to the screen, look at the list, and now knowing what you know, write what you would make different if you had to start all over again.

And now, start again and make it better.

Count Your Results

In real life, getting great at something doesn’t happen overnight. Unlike movies, we don’t have flash forward scenes in real life that take us from the starting point to the finish line in 60 seconds. So the fact that you are not the best of the world in whatever you have chosen to do after 1 month trying, doesn’t mean you will never be.

Getting better takes time and hard, smart work and it is easy to lose motivation without perspective.

The best way to get an accurate perspective in relation to our dreams and goals is by tracking our results consistently. If we do so, we will soon find that even when we are not yet where we want to be, we have improved immensely when compared to the place where we were yesterday.

We don’t have to get from 0 to 100 in 30 days. If only we improve 1% every day, after a year we will be 364% better than the year before. A whole year might seem like a lot of time, but time will pass anyway, whether you choose to improve or not. How different your life would be today if you would have made the decision to exercise for 15 minutes 4 times a week a year ago? 15 minutes a day is not a lot, and 2014 went by quicker than you thought, right?. Well, you will feel the same way a year from now.

So start walking towards your dreams and goals, even if is just a little bit every day. But count your results! Take note of every improvement you make along the way, no matter how insignificant it seems right now, because the “little” improvements you will make one year from now, will seem like a lifetime’s work in comparison with the improvements you made on your first week. But the only way to realize this is by taking notes along the way.

Assess your success not by comparing where you stand from where you want to be, but by comparing where you stand from the place you stand before.

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The Discipline Manifesto: Overcoming Procrastination and Harnessing Willpower in 5 Steps will be available soon! You can grab a FREE copy for a limited period of time, so don’t miss this opportunity to improve your self-discipline beyond what you ever though possible and subscribe!

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