P is for Persistence

Welcome to Day 16 of the A-Z Blog Challenge, and my Letters of Gratitude.

I’ve said it before here on my blog: We OVERESTIMATE what we can accomplish in a day and UNDERESTIMATE what we can accomplish in a year.


PERSISTENCE: Do it and stuff happens.


I’ve always been a big one for goal setting. I used to coach people in business. For two and a half days each week I would talk to clients every half hour for 8 hours a day. My job was to help them become more productive.

Most people would come to the phone feeling they’d been missing something, that they needed that secret that would propel them into the stratosphere. Our level of production at the time was so huge, they couldn’t see themselves being able to do a tenth of what we had accomplished in business. “Sharon, what’s that missing piece? What’s that spark that motivated you to go to the next level?” Everyone thought there was some secret to high levels of achievement. They hired me to give it to them.

My job was to help them realize that the secret was within them all along. You don’t have to be smarter, faster, prettier than anybody else. Every writer alive has been told, “You’re a natural.” We all think we are all so special, don’t we? Yes, we have to believe in our work. But the truth is, TALENT IS OVERRATED.

It’s persistence that gets us to where we want to go. If you want to do and go where others haven’t gone, you have to do what others won’t do to get there. Everyone wants a shortcut. A magic bullet. A technique or brilliant answer to all our problems, without learning through trial and error, what we should be doing. 

Bella Andre taught me this. I don’t think I’ve ever run across a harder working writer. And she reads a book EVERY day, too. She’s managed to turn her career from mid-list author without a contract to megablockbusting Indie author phenom in less than 2 years. She did it by doing what others wouldn’t do.

How many of us would have quit if we had a big deal withdrawn? Who picks up the pieces after the Snoopy Dancing when there is no party? When the bride and groom don’t show up to the wedding? Bella went to work. She got very good at literally running over every obstacle that could come her way.

She became persistent.

Did she fail? Sometimes. Did she have doubts, disappointments? Of course. But just like the Realtors I used to coach, and I’ve coached probably 200-250 of them during my time, I would tell my clients what they needed to do to be successful and less than 10% would do it. It’s probably even less than 10%. 

But not Bella. What about you? Do you show up every day and do your best? Like I said in the letter O post, are you Open for business? Really?