Is persistence the Answer?

If you accept to never give up and always persist in what you want you are bound to get what you want so the ideology goes. As a kid, you would cry and annoy your parents over something you wanted and sometimes it did work and they gave in. We end up carrying this approach as we grow older and reinforce it in our daily lives. Let’s try looking at it from different perspectives.

In life accompanied by disappointments, persistence can be seen to be one of the major factors that have helped us get some goals done. When everything is pointing in the wrong direction we tend to want a bit of fuel to keep the persistence going. This leads us to Desire, where with a strong enough desire we allow ourselves to delay gratification and pass through the troubles. Others have termed it as the energy we give to the world where what we give off ends up coming back to us. The scripture also reinforces this in Mathews 7:7 where it says Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. All this is trying to show us how persistence coupled with desire can get you places. For the most part, I believe this to be true but my argument is on direction.

Direction is one of the key things we could consider that aims our persistence and desire. The wrong direction can lead us to persist in things that are better off left. I believe we all have a natural thing we are good at even though we might or might not know it. In discovering this is where persistence becomes fulfilling. But as people finding what we are good at is a rocky step while to some it comes easy. The key is to persist just enough to discover if the work is fulfilling, this doesn’t mean something has to be all positive but the question is to ask yourself is if the negatives associated with it could be never-ending would you be able to live with it. For example, in business, the positive can be making a profit but the negatives can vary from failed business ventures, frustrations with wrong predictions in the market and other stresses such even plans falling through. So, you ask, can I accept both the negatives and positives and live through it? The point is how we can have some end goal such as one day owning a house but the means of reaching it are plenty, Worthwhile persistence is about finding what’s meaningful and worth suffering for.

Meaningful suffering is what brings fulfilment and not the avoidance of suffering.