Every person is born with the basic
drive to persevere. No matter how
crushed, how defeated, how demoralized,
when all hope seems gone, there
is, in the healthy person, a small,
indistinguishable flame of hope — like
a faint but persistent pilot light that
stays alight, much like the fire ancient
man used to carry with him as he
moved from place to place.
Almost everyone comes to a place in
life when going on seems futile, even
ridiculous — when he seems overwhelmed
by a suffocating mattress of
events and situations, and desires just to sit
down in the middle of the road and let the
world and everything in it go to blazes.
So he sits down for a while. But then the vibration
of the world seems to make itself felt in his
bones. Pretty soon, he raises his head and begins to look
around. After a while, he takes a couple of deep breaths,
gets slowly, painfully to his feet, wobbles there for a minute or
two, and then he starts out again. Often as not, around the next bend
in the road, he'll find the reason he kept going. And he'll shudder
at the
thought of how close he came to giving up.
His hope lies in movement and time. If he does not get up and start moving
again, he's done for. But he has this natural drive to keep moving along
the
road. As long as he keeps heading for what he's looking for, what seemed
like
the end of the world for him will be nothing more than a bad dream, and a part
of the preparation he needed to qualify for the achievement his perseverance
has brought.
Movement, time, and the law of averages; I remember reading about the manager
of a major-league ball club who kept a rookie on the team and in the lineup
because even though he wasn't hitting anywhere near what was expected
of him,
when he struck out, he struck out swinging. He wasn't just standing there
watching
strikes go by. And, as the manager expected, he soon started getting wood on
the ball and bringing his average up to where it belonged.
Discouragement seems to be part of life, but the reason people prevail is
because of this built-in drive to keep going.
Source: Earl Nightingale's The Essence of Success
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