Persistence
Camping, Ants & Tortilla Chips |
No, I don’t camp in the winter anymore. I’m a fair weather camper (although it seems to rain every time). My love of camping has facilitated a long-standing battle with ants. Crawling all over the food. Marching in a line from the sand to my tent. Ruining jars of honey if left unattended for even a minute. So… I was making lunch by the fire one day (last spring), when I noticed a tortilla chip dance across the ground. Since I had never seen a tortilla chip dance, I crouched down to investigate. Evidently, an especially persistent ant had found it under my foldout chair. He was toting his enormous treasure back to wherever the ants in live. I was mesmerized. And quite impressed. Ants are amazing creatures. They can easily carry things more than 50 times their body mass and will patiently travel several miles to bring a prize home to the colony. Several miles, can you imagine? Now, I don’t necessarily want them running amok on my campsite picnic, that doesn’t detract from the the fact that there is a lot to learn from them. When ants are on the trail for food, they don’t let obstacles stand in their way. They don’t stand around with their hands on their hips and look at each other in disbelief. They don’t throw in the towel the moment things get hard. They don’t shrug their shoulders and simply give up. They don’t make excuses or apologies. They don’t feel sorry for themselves and decide that success isn’t for them. Ants value grit over quit. There are plenty of human examples of grit. Thomas Edison was famously told by his grade school teachers that he was “too stupid to learn anything”, then went on to prove them right by failing 1,000 times to invent a working light bulb. The scientific theories of Charles Darwin and Louis Pasteur were publicly ridiculed during their lifetimes as complete nonsense. Although she wrote nearly 1,800 poems in her lifetimes (many of them ironically about persistence), Emily Dickinson only had about a dozen published before her death. I believe Van Gogh only sold one painting during his lifetime. Walt Disney was fired by his newspaper editor for “lacking imagination”. Kentucky Fried Chicken’s Colonel Sanders was told no 1,009 times. Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. The corporate bigwigs at Atari laughed at Steve Jobs’ ”personal computer”. J.K. Rowling has 12 framed rejection letters for her manuscript Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. She was told over and over that no one would read a book about a boy wizard. But nevertheless, like every other badass momma, she persisted, and millions of no ones read that very book. There is something to be said for staying at a thing. Research hints that perseverance actually trumps innate intelligence and talent as a measure of success. Look at any successful human being and you’ll see a long road of mistakes and setbacks behind them. As Sumner Redstone reminds us, “Great success is built on failure, frustration, even catastrophe.” But to really succeed, it takes more than hard work, determination and stick-withitness. Perseverance alone will not guarantee safety. Persistence also requires passion. When I think back to that ant, I think about how that tortilla chip was his whole world. Ditto Edison and electricity, Disney and imagination, Rowling and her boy wizard. Grit and diligence work best when you know your why. If the end goal isn’t something that aligns with your heart and soul, no amount of tenaciousness will keep you going after the newness wears off. *You see it all the time at the gym or any local martial arts academy. People (may) start strong, but inevitably, the drop out rate is steep! Find Your Tortilla! So then success, however you define it, is a two-step process. Know your why. Figure out what sets your soul on fire and then keep doing that, if only for the joy it brings. You being your best serves the world. Do it because it makes your heart sing, because it makes you leap out of bed with excitement that you are in fact living your life in the way you want to (if even partly). Like that ant, find your tortilla chip and be willing to carry it on your back however long the road, however many challenges are put in your way. Keep Going! |
Podfade?! What?! |
Speaking of persistence… Did you know that Podcasts have a failure rate of 94.77%! Which is an even worse statistic than martial artists! Yes, less than 10% of people who begin martial arts are still training in it after just 2 years. Which means that I broke both of those statistics, which makes this even more special! So… Join me in celebrating my 200th podcast episode! That’s right, I started the PeaceWalker Podcast back in 2020 and it is now in its 5th season! Crazy huh!? You can catch the episode by clicking the link below: https://open.spotify.com/ Amazingly it too is about Persistence! Enjoy and… |
Keep Going, ~Craig |
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