Quotes About Persistence

To make progress toward a goal, whether it's noble or crass, requires the energy and drive of the Elephant. And

big changes come from a succession of small changes. It's OK if the first changes seem almost trivial. The challenge is to get the Elephant moving, even if the movement is slow at first.

dogged focus

What separated Blakely from other women with the same idea was her persistence.

At this "insight" stage, it's easy to get depressed, because insight doesn't always strike immediately.

The project often feels like a failure in the middle. But if the team persists through this valley of angst and doubt, it eventually emerges with a growing sense of momentum. Team members begin to test out their new designs, and they realize the improvements they've made, and they keep tweaking the design to make it better. And they come to realize, we've cracked this problem. That's when the team reaches the peak of confidence.

Pain now for a payoff later.

new habits can clear the Path.

people will persevere only if they perceive falling down as learning rather than as failing.

Big problems are rarely solved with commensurately big solutions. Instead, they are most often solved by a sequence of small solutions, sometimes over weeks, sometimes over decades. And

Why did they quit so easily? The answer may surprise you: They ran out of self-control.

It took practice, and it took persistence.

So, yes, a long journey starts with a single step, but a single step doesn't guarantee the long journey. How do you keep those steps coming?

Pits need to be filled.

That sense of progress is critical, because the Elephant in us is easily demoralized. It's easily spooked, easily derailed, and for that reason, it needs reassurance, even for the very first step of the journey.

Grit is not synonymous with hard work. It involves a certain single-mindedness. An ungritty prison inmate will mount a daring new escape attempt every month, but a gritty prison inmate will tunnel his way out one spoonful of concrete at a time. Grit

And when people exhaust their self-control, what they're exhausting are the mental muscles needed to think creatively, to focus, to inhibit their impulses, and to persist in the face of frustration or failure. In other words, they're exhausting precisely the mental muscles needed to make a big change.

When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur…. Don't look for the quick, big improvement. Seek the small improvement one day at a time. That's the only way it happens—and when it happens, it lasts.

To lead a process requires persistence.

What should a Pegasus person do in this situation?

Pray when you feel like praying," somebody has said. "Pray when you don't feel like praying. Pray until you do feel like praying.

All the way back, I pondered the word endure, what it meant. It didn't mean giving in. It didn't mean being weak or accepting injustice. It meant taking the challenges thrown at us and dealing with them as intelligently as we knew until we grew stronger than them.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

For seven lifetimes will I follow you to the ends of the earth.