Persistence Matters
I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to do a lot of different things in my life. Some early lessons helped me.
One of the important lessons that I learned from my mother was to put my best effort into any challenge that I faced.
Like any youngster, it took a while for mother’s advice to really mean anything to me. Certainly by the time I was a teenager and a Boy Scout, I was close to figuring it out. I know it was part of my character by the time I got through the first semesterhave been fortunate to have the opportunity to do a lot of different things in my life. Some early lessons helped me. One of the important lessons that I learned from my mother was to put my best effort into any challenge that I faced. Like any youngster, it took a while for mother’s advice to really mean anything to me.
Certainly by the time I was a teenager and a Boy Scout, I was close to figuring it out. I know it was part of my character by the time I got through the first semester at McCallie, the military boarding school, where I attended for high school.
When I got to college, no one told me, but I knew that I had to do well. I felt an obligation to my mother who had worked really hard to give me the opportunity to be the first of our family to attend college. I knew people who gave up on college before their freshman year was over or who made a college career out of expending minimal effort on anything but partying.
I certainly enjoyed college, but I also turned out good grades. It was just a matter of working harder than you played. By the time I got to college I had taken to heart the idea that trying something new is one of the keys to growth. Sometimes it takes a lot of persistence to master something or get to the point where you actually can enjoy what you are doing. I also learned that you don’t have to be an expert or be perfect at something to have fun. I took up cross-country skiing on the Radcliffe Quad when I ended up living there senior year. While I would have never classified myself as an expert, it was something that I enjoyed for decades especially when we lived on the farm and I had a nice snow-packed road to the back of our farm
Those years after college when I farmed were a great learning experience. I know it is popular today to think a little skill and a lot of YouTube can make you the master of anything. I actually know people who appear to think they were born knowing everything. Remodeling an old house would be a quick antidote to that. I had to become a plumber and electrician to get our 200-year old Nova Scotia farm house to something close to livable. Copper plumbing is not easy and I not even sure people do it these days, but I did a whole house in it back in 1971. I also did all the wiring and built the cabinets. There were no YouTubes. I did have some printed guides and managed to be successful using them.
One of the corollaries to mother’s rule that I picked up on the farm was that it is easier to do something right the first time than to do it quickly and have to do it over. I also learned that if you have to do something two or three times to get it right, the effort is well worth it. Try doing a poor job of fencing with a large herd of cattle, and that lesson will become clear.
Interestingly it doesn’t even matter if what you are doing is of great importance. Sometimes doing the small things in life with pride is what gets us through the tough times. The feeling that I used to get from mowing my yard well was something that kept me doing a great job with the mowing. I no longer mow yards but I still have a job and take great pride in the work that I turn out. I also take pride in our garden and the food that I cook.
There are times when persistence can make a huge difference, I have been kayaking on the two-mile wide White Oak River and had the conditions turn nasty. About thirty minutes into a battle that should have been less than ten minutes, you dig deep and keep paddling until you reach the calm of the inlet. If you stop paddling the odds of getting home safely diminish rapidly.
As we get older, most of us don’t have the opportunity to apply a lot that we have learned to important projects, but there is nothing to say that we have been released from doing anything but the best at whatever we do.
Achieving the best in anything that I do is just part of my being. I am not sure that I know how to give less than 110% to anything that I do. When nothing else is going right, I still can stand proud of my efforts in the small things in life even if is just turning out an article I am proud of writing.