Inc Description Perseverance

Lara Croft can’t climb without her pickaxes, and you can’t reach your goals without perseverance. If you can reach your goals without perseverance, maybe you need bigger goals ;-)

However...

1. Perseverance burns through all your physical and mental mana.
2. People will hate you for it.
3. It takes time and effort, so you’ll have very little time for yourself.
4. At times it’ll feel like everything and everyone that could oppose you is joining forces to stop you.

Perseverance isn’t easy because it goes against our programming. We want to avoid pain, mental and physical, and we want to be liked. And it’s not just people who oppose us. The universe throws unseen forces at us whenever we try to go against our programming.

There are plenty of quotes like “perseverance pays off!” and “perseverance is power!” On their own they don’t help much. What people need to understand is what happens when they choose not to persevere.

The brain is about 2% of your body mass but uses around 20% of your energy, so it has to be as efficient as possible. It does this by forming neural pathways based on how you habitually think, act and feel. These pathways are shortcuts that let you run your habits on less energy. Remember how hard it was to learn a skill you now do without thinking? That’s your new neural pathways at work.

Every time we give up when something or someone opposes us, we train those pathways to default to forfeit, and that can have tragic consequences for the decisions we make later.

If you have a worthy goal, the only option is to make perseverance second nature.