Perseverance Is Magic

After creating an intention and choosing a tool or technique to help focus our attention on it, we will surely achieve quick and easy success.

Are you laughing? That was supposed to be a joke. Remember, doing something intentionally and deliberately—and staying focused on it—requires conscious attention. If we’ve already got a habit in place that we’re trying to change, we have to convince our brain to go along with the plan, and that isn’t going to happen overnight.

The problem is that we’d prefer instant gratification, while our brain requires persistent effort on our part to convince it that we really do want X instead of Y. When at first we don’t succeed, we might decide it’s not worth the effort. Why bother? Just go with the flow. Or we might chalk it up to being weak or lacking discipline or having no will power. So we give up—to prove the point, apparently.

Perseverance isn’t the same as dogged persistence. Sometimes there’s a good reason to stop attempting to do something. One of the reasons for paying attention is that we might recognize that it isn’t precisely A we want; it’s more along the lines of B. Or we might realize we’ve bitten off too big a chunk and need to pare down our intention. Perseverance just means we keep moving toward the desired outcome. It’s incredibly simple. We don’t need to chastise ourselves. We don’t need to make up excuses. We just pick up where we left off and keep going. It isn’t a competition or a race. It doesn’t matter when we get where we’re going, just that we get there.

 Continuous effort—not strength or intelligence—is the key to unlocking our potential.    ― Winston Churchill

It helps to have a cheerleader—a person or a group of people—who can encourage us. We don’t need someone to call us out on our failure to achieve instant results. We need someone who recognizes that what we’re trying to do isn’t easy, not because we’re incapable or lazy, but because we’re human and our brain is very set in its ways.

Perseverance gets a bad rap in some quarters. It isn’t flashy or catchy or stylish. It’s often linked with discipline and endurance and sounds like something that’s good for you or that builds character. But perseverance is the key to accessing the brain’s autopilot. It really is magic.