When Persistence Meets Resistance Persistently, Persistence Wins.

I have a great friend from my college days called Samuel with whom we have a unique way of interacting. I call him sokoro (grandfather) even though he is older than me by less than half a decade. He is a stone throw older than me in other words. He started calling me grandson while in college and even though I resisted that, eventually persistence won. We nowadays call each other those names seamlessly and we are comfortable with it.

So last week when I posted a quote indicating that nothing in the world can take the place of persistence, and I went ahead to indicate that perhaps persistence and determination are the only non-divine omnipotent things in the world; he couldn’t agree any less.

After I posted that quote on my WhatsApp status, he quoted the title of this article in my inbox and that is how I began to think about the words. Persistence is one of the greatest virtues we have besides patience. When we talk of determination, it is the prerequisite of patience. The act of hanging in there even when things are not going as expected. Persistence on the other hand is the resolve not give up or let go. And this is the muscle that the successful guys seem to be have developed properly.

I find it interesting reading about how persistence helped people to make it big in this life and I can’t think there is anything to take its place even today. Talk of the Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling, who despite being rejected by the 12 largest publishers, kept going until Bloomsbury publishing house accepted her manuscript. Bloomsbury was a small publisher that changed the fate of the author. And today we talk of the successful Rowling. It is quite unfortunate that some of us get rejected once or twice and we then lose hope immediately.

Another icon is Henry Ford of the Ford Motor Company. In fact I should confess that one of my favorite vehicles is the Ford Ranger double cabin. A few insights from his autobiography, you can’t miss the drive and persistence in Henry. He failed twice and even became bankrupt while building the efficient motor vehicle of the day. While reading his book, I remember an instance where his investors complained that he had spent a lot of time in research and design. To him he was after excellence as well as quality while the investors were after returns on their investments and possibly cashing out irregardless of the standard of the product.

Perhaps if Henry Ford had not persisted, the innovations and inventions to do with the motor vehicles could have taken longer. The industrial revolution birthed by his assembly process idea, used in most manufacturing companies today, could have delayed the major industrial revolution brought about by it in early 1900’s. Ford had a lot of problems convincing investors after the bankruptcy to invest in the company again. Persistence is what won him a later investment that came along from one major investor who ended up bringing the tipping point of the Ford Company we know today.

Most recently, the iconic Google Company underwent some challenges at the beginning of this century. The company was growing in terms of operations as well as employees but revenues weren’t matching the growth. The company was not making a profit. Nevertheless Larry Page and Sergey Brine sticked in there until the concept of advertising came along and the company didn’t remain the same there after. By the time Google did its Initial Public Offering (IPO) in 2004, it was insanely profitable already. And that was the cost of persistence to these two founders.

Albert Einstein grew up a frail child from his early days. His teachers argued that he couldn’t amount to anything in life. These words seeming to fuel the young Einstein to greatness, inspired the young man who ended up revolutionizing physics with his 1905 law of relativity. This earned him the title of the father of physics and multiple citizenships including that of the USA.

Had Einstein carried the words of his teachers until later life and given up on his persistence to do research in physics through his imaginative powers, perhaps the world couldn’t be the same as it is today. This proves that above everything, determination and persistence are two powerful tools that we have and that we can use to change the world.

Whatever resistance we face in our way towards achieving our dreams, if we keep on with persistence, it eventually wins. It matters not how many times we have failed, it matters not how far we feel we have lost it, if we keep pushing on it with progress however small it may look, we will end up changing the world.

We may be educated but if we cannot persist in our endeavors, our education becomes a tool of suppression in and of itself especially in this age and time when success is not going to schools to get an education and a good job. The same is true for our talents. Talent without initiative is useless as is initiative without persistence. Even Einstein who was a genius needed to do something about it, and not just that only, but he also needed to persist in his endeavors and that is how the law of relativity was born.

So whatever thing we are doing, under whatever circumstances and in whichever way, determination and persistence will determine if we succeed or fail. Choice is ours.

End.