We read about people who sail around the world in a thirty-foot sailboat or overcome handicaps to win a gold medal at the Olympics, and we later find their lives are stories of persistence. I remember well the day I sat down to write the first of my radio programs. That was more than twenty years ago, more than fifty- two hundred programs ago, the equivalent of thirty-six full-length books. Certainly, no world's record, but a good example of what persistence can do.
When we see the tired faces of commuters on the big city subway, and children climbing aboard the school bus, we see persistence at work. We see it in the expression of a housewife doing grocery shopping or the week's laundry. But everything we do contributes to the life we lead, the joys we experience, the satisfactions we realize from time to time. And persistence itself is a joy when we're doing what we enjoy and want to do. Not a very complicated formula, it is?
by Earl Nightingale