Last year I took my team for our team retreat to the North Georgia Mountains and spent some time re-aligning our focus as a team. We had just come off an incredible few years of rapid growth launching new products/ideas and needed to hunker down and focus on some things.
This is a struggle for me because I’m always thinking about what’s next. For this retreat I had to stop thinking the “next” was something new and instead that the “next” was to focus and persevere on the “now” of our brands/products.
While we were there I decided I would lead one session on the most important aspect of success; perseverance.
If you think about it, there’s one thing that every successful person has in common. In one way or another there is an element of perserverance. If they didn’t perservere there wouldn’t be success. I know it’s somewhat of a basic principle, but it’s true. Those who are successful today (for the most part) have had to persevere through tough times and hold on during the turbulence of their journey.
Perseverance is everything. It’s the difference between the startup business and the fortune 500 company. It’s the difference between $100,000 in revenue and $1,000,000 in revenue. It’s doing something over and over and over and over. And over.
You’ve probably heard that the phrase “overnight success” is never true. Most “overnight success” stories were 10, 20, or 30 years in the making. They were laying the ground work doing the thing they believed in over and over.
You know that time when things just don’t seem to be working out. You’ve tried a few things differently but you feel like you’re spinning your wheels? This is the turning point in perseverance. If you really believe that this solution, product, system or idea is great, those who are able to dig deep and press through trials and tribulation will have a higher change of success.!
Think about Apple, one of my favorite companies. If they hadn’t “persevered,” there wouldn’t be an iMac, there wouldn’t be OS X (a software that revolutionized the entire computing industry), there wouldn’t be an iPhone or even the iPad!
If you’re like me, if Apple were to not have perservered, my life would look a lot different.
So when you’re thinking the cards are stacked against you, or you think everyone is standing in your way… don’t give up. Press on. Stay the course. Believe that you CAN and WILL succeed.
Don’t throw the towel in yet and don’t let everyone else tell you the “grass is greener on the other side” becuase it isn’t. You’re so close. The fog will clear so you can see the finish line soon. KEEP GOING!
Persevere and stick with it. You’ll be glad you did one day. I promise.
