Persistence

Audio link: https://t.me/Bob_Proctor_PoP/69

A person that doesn't have persistence is not going to go very far. Persistence, I believe, is one of the most important. Persistence is an essential factor in the procedure of transmuting desire into its monetary equivalent.

Of the 13 principles of success that Napoleon Hill lined up, I believe the most important one, at least it is to me, is number eight one. He called number eight. I've had a difficult time just deciding on what order they do in because they all run together.

But number eight was persistence. And on the very first page he wrote, there may be no heroic connotation to the word, but he said, the quality is to the character of man, what carbon is to steal. A person that doesn't have persistence is not going to go very far.

I have shared something out of this book on persistence with thousands and thousands of salespeople all over the world. I want to share something, he said, and I want you to really think about what I'm saying and I want you to think about your goal. He said, there is no substitute for persistence.

It cannot be supplanted by any other quality. Now think of that. He said, remember this, and it will hurt you in the beginning, when the going may seem difficult and slow.

He said, those who have cultivated the habit of persistence seem to enjoy an insurance against failure. Now, he said, no matter how many times they are defeated, they finally arise up towards the top of the ladder. Now, he says, sometimes it appears that there is a hidden guide I love this.

Whose duty is to test you through all sorts of discouraging experiences. Those who pick themselves up after defeat and keep on trying arrive, and the world cries, Bravo. I knew you could do it.

The hidden guide lets no one enjoy great achievement without passing the persistent test. Those who can't take it simply don't make the grade. Those who can take it are bountifully rewarded for their persistence.

They receive as their compensation whatever goal they are pursuing. Now, in another part of this, he was obviously in New York. He was sitting in a hotel room and he was looking down on Broadway, and he wrote, as these lines are being written, I look up from my work and I see before me, less than a block away, the great mysterious Broadway, the graveyard of dead hopes and the front porch of opportunity.

He said, from all over the world, people have come to Broadway seeking fame, fortune, power, love, or whatever it is the human being calls success. He said, once in a while, someone steps out from this long procession of seekers, and the world hears that another person has mastered Broadway. But, he said, Broadway is not easily nor quickly conquered.

She acknowledges talent, recognizes genius, and pays off in money only after a person has absolutely refused to quit. Then we know that this person has discovered the secret to conquer Broadway. And the secret is always inseparably, attached in one word persistence.

You know, I have compared that to sales. I've compared it to success in engineering in every walk of life. If you just take Broadway out and put your business, your industry in, it fits because you're going to be tested time and time again.

So how do you develop this quality called persistence? Well, he tells you in here how to develop it. But I've come to the conclusion, if you don't have a proper desire, you're never going to develop persistence. Desire comes from something you want.

It begins as a want. You've got to really want it. I think it stands to reason that you're not going to persist at something you don't enjoy.

You're not going to persist at something you don't like. So a person has to start out with a want. This is all covered in desire.

And that want has to really start cooking in your mind. And then you have to get emotionally involved with it. And it's the emotional involvement that plants that idea properly, plants it in your subconscious mind.

You have to feed that then. And you feed it through faith. And it's the faith that you're going to reach this that causes you to keep focusing on it.

Now, the will is a mental faculty that causes or enables you to focus. If you don't have a highly developed will, you won't focus. You're going to be scattered all over the place.

All the outside world is going to beg your attention through your senses. You're going to be hearing, seeing, smelling, and everything outside is going to grab your attention. When you have a highly devolved will, it's almost like you shut down the senses.

You bring your mind to bear on the one concept that's really important to you what you want. The outside world shut off, and then you start feeding that desire. It becomes easy then to persist.

Now, he tells us here there's four steps. He clearly outlines them. Anyone that wants to develop persistence.

Now, I would pay particular attention to this. I've shared this with thousands of people. It's very important.

He said there are four steps which lead to the habit of persistence. They call for no amount of intelligence, no particular amount of education, and but little time or effort. The necessary steps are, number one, a definite purpose backed by a burning desire for its fulfillment.

So here we go back to our desire again. If it isn't there, you're not going to develop it. So you've got to go back.

Do I really want this? Is it something that is very important to me? You see, most people, when they're setting goals, they don't go after what they really want. They go after what they think they can get, but they go after something they've already got. And the goal is important because the goal is what causes us to move ahead in life.

Goals are not to get. Goals are to grow. Causes the stretch to reach higher than we are right now in our growth.

And if we set a goal just to go after something we already know we can get, that's sort of silly. I had a fellow one time in the seminar come up and asked me if he could talk to me about his goal. I said sure.

I said, what's your goal? And he told me he wanted to get a new car. And I said, okay, what kind of a car do you want? He said a Pontiac. That's one of the nice cars I've had, a Pontiac.

I said, how long you had the car? You got one now? And he said, yeah, I've had it four years. Said, how old is the car? He said four years. So I said, you're telling me that you had a new Pontiac four years ago and now your goal is to get a new Pontiac? I said, You've known for four years how to get a new Pontiac.

That wouldn't constitute a goal. You got to go after something you really want. See, he didn't understand the concept, so he had never developed persistence because he didn't have the proper goal.

And if he graduates from that, then he's going after something he thinks he can get. He starts to measure his resources, his money, and he thinks, I could do this if this happened, that happens. That's not going to cut it.

He's got to go past that. He's got to go after something he really wants, and he probably won't know how to get it. When we want something, it's coming from inside it's causing us to stretch.

And you've got to have something you really want or you're never going to develop persistence. Now, he says, the eight step principles of success. Remember I mentioned there was 30 major causes of failure, but there's only 13 steps it's going to guarantee that you can develop well.

And he's clearly outlined it in persistence, I believe is one of the most important. So when he says, you've got to have this burning desire, if you're not going after something you really want, you won't develop it. And you've got to understand, you don't have to know how to get it.

People that have accomplished anything in their life, they didn't know how to get it when they set the objective. They just knew they would. We've covered this in the decision lesson.

Pay particular attention to that lesson before you come back to this. He said, number one, a definite purpose backed by a burning desire for its fulfillment. And number two, a definite plan expressed in continuous action.

Now, we're going to point out where that plan might change. As a matter of fact, the plan probably will change because you're going to be led by the 6th sense when we get into that, your intuitive factor. You're going to find that the way will be shown and where you lay down your plan, the plan will probably be changed.

But you never change the objective. You persist. You keep on going.

Number three, he said, a mind close tightly against all negative and discouraging influences, including negative suggestions of relatives, friends and acquaintances. That's very important. The people you associate with, they play an enormous role in your life.

So you've got to be very careful about the people you spend a lot of time with. We are not thinking anywhere near as often as we choose to believe we are. And when we're not thinking, our mind is wide open.

And so those negative suggestions are coming right in. And like that, we're snapped into a negative vibration. That's why this third part is so important.

A mind closed tightly against all negative and discouraging influences. Do you know you can form the habit of just rejecting all negativity. You can get your mind onto such a positive frequency that none of the negative stuff is going to stick.

It just doesn't resonate with your thinking. Number four a friendly alliance with one or more persons who will encourage you to follow through with both plan and purpose. But he says these four steps are essential for success in all walks of life.

So you see, it really doesn't matter what you're doing, it's how you're doing it. It doesn't matter what the objective is, as long as you really want it. You've got to turn it into a burning desire, otherwise you will not persist.

When you've got the idea properly planted in your mind, it starts to control you. And he points that out. He said, first you give life action and guidance to the idea, but then it'll take on a power of its own and it gives life, action and guidance to you and it just keeps driving you.

This idea of persistence cannot be given too much importance because it's that one quality inside that's going to keep you going. You're going to run into all sorts of discouraging experiences. Napoleon Hill was told that by Andrew Carnegie when he first set out on this mission.

Now, here's a guy that was starting out, a young reporter, and he was told by his mentor that you could do better than I'm doing. Now, if that's where all of this philosophy originated, with Andrew Carnegie, and then it was studied and passed on to us by Napoleon Hill, I think we should pay attention to it. Here's a poor young man that's going to go past the wealthiest man in the world, and he did.

He accomplished more. Why? Because he kept giving himself the proper affirmations. But he wouldn't have done that had he not had the proper goal.

You see, he sold himself on the idea that he could do something and he had absolutely no idea how it was going to happen. That's what you've got to do. You've got to pick the target that really is important to you, otherwise you'll never develop the persistence.

And he said, you've got to turn it into a habit. Now let's think of what a habit is for a moment. A habit is an idea that's planted in your subject of mind, and it's planted so often bang.

It automatically takes over and it automatically expresses itself without any conscious thought. Habits make us. They also break us.

And when you develop the habit of persistence, the idea of slowing down, the idea of stopping it just doesn't enter your mind. You're going to keep going. It doesn't matter how tough it is.

I can think of so many times in my life when everything in me wanted to quit, but I just couldn't do it because I had formed a habit of persistence. You see, I took these 13 principles. I took them super serious after I started to get into it.

Now I was using this philosophy and I was winning. It was like a game. I really didn't understand what I was doing.

But then one day I had to sit down and ask myself, what the heck is happening? And as I started to study this in depth, I realized that all successful people were following all of these principles. Whether they were consciously aware of it or not was another thing. But I never ever met anyone who was very successful that was not also persistent that followed their path.

Now, do you know this is something that you really want to study and study in depth? Get this study into it. General. A lot of people talk about luck, lucky breaks.

The only break that you're ever going to be able to depend upon is the one you give yourself. There's no such thing as a lucky break. Somebody asked Phil about that one time.

He suggested that he got a lucky break with Carnegie. He said it was no lucky break. That took 25 years of in depth research without being paid, without the struggles that he had.

And I guess when somebody looked at him and thought it was lucky break, he probably thought, they obviously really don't know what they're talking about. There isn't any such thing as luck. There's focus, there's goals, there's dreams, and there's principles that you have to follow if you're going to win.

People talk about being in the right place at the right time. You got to be aware that you're in the right place at the right time. And then you've got to follow all these principles.

You've got to incorporate them into your life. And persistence is an absolute prerequisite. He said, without it, none of the others really matter because you're not going to keep on going.

So forget the idea of the lucky break. Create one for yourself. That's how you're going to get the breaks.

Think of the people you know who are always struggling. Everyone's surrounded by them. What are they missing? First of all, they're missing a target.

They don't know where they're going. They're buffered here and there just by whatever is going on. Conditions and circumstance control their life.

They start and they stop. There's no such thing as persistence, but we have to back up. You see, when you start thinking about this quality that he's talking here his 8th principle.

You're talking about something that is the outgrowth of something else. It starts out with a want. You've got to really want it.

And if you know how to get it, you don't need persistence. There's no growth to that. It's got to be something you want.

And you turn the want into a desire. That desire is fueled by faith. You don't wonder if it's going to happen.

You know it's going to happen. You just don't know how it's going to happen. And when you've got all those qualities and you've got them all blended together, see all these 13 principles, you have a difficult time talking about one without bringing the other in it's because the whole universe operates by law, and there is only one power, and all the laws jive in together.

They meld together just like the colors of a rainbow. So you've got to really study these principles and take a look at them and understand they're all required. You can't grab one or two and say, I'm going to make it on this.

It doesn't happen that way. And so when you see a person, they're starting and they're stopping. They're going so far and they hit a block on the road and they get discouraged and quit.

They're missing some part of the puzzle. They're not going after what they want. They haven't got the desire, they don't have the faith.

So they're not going to develop their persistence. When you have this persistence, you're going to keep going. Come hell or high water, nothing is going to stop you.

Absolutely nothing. You'll see this in all the lives of people that have accomplished something. Study.

The Wright Brothers. I've studied them. Study.

Sir Edmund hillary. I had the good fortune of working with him on three or four different occasions. The only difference I could see in him and anybody else was his size.

He's a big man, but he was persistent. He was going to get to the top of Mount Everest. He didn't get there the first time.

He was a beekeeper from Auckland, New Zealand. He went in 1951. He didn't make it.

He failed. He went in 1952. He failed again.

Everybody thought he was crazy going back, because prior to that, anybody that really tried it, they either failed or died trying. But in 1953, he and Ten Things Norgate stood right on top of the world. You know, there's been a thousand people do it since then, but he was the first.

Without persistence, no one does it. It's in everyone, every person that's ever succeeded. Study Edison.

Only three years of schooling, just three years of schooling, and look what he accomplished. He was persistent. It's been estimated that he tried to build a light 3000 different times.

And he said he didn't see those as failures. He said there was 3000 steps to creating the incandescent light. But it was persistence that kept him going.

See, he had the dream in his mind, he had the vision and he had fallen in love with it. That is absolutely essential. If you're going to develop persistence into a habit.

You've got to make sure that you've got the want. You've got to really want whatever it is. You do not have to know how to get it.

You've got to turn it into a desire. You've got to feel it beating inside. And then you're going to develop the persistence and you're going to find that it's going to happen one day.

You're going to look and you're going to realize you've reached the goal. You know, funny thing about it, sometimes you get into such a habit of working towards the goal. Sometimes you're past it before you even realize it.

And the goal is something in retrospect, you actually did it. But persistence is essential. It's like Hill said right in the beginning.

He said, there may be no heroic connotation to the word, but the quality is to the character of the human. Like what carbon is to steal. Make certain that you develop persistence into a habit, but it'll only become a habit if you've got the others all lined up.

Every failure in life carries with it the seed of an equivalent advantage. There's something good in everything. Nothing's all good, nothing's all bad.

Everything just is. It's what we make it. And every, every time you stumble there's something good in it.

I can share something with you. I wrote a book a number of years ago. You were born rich.

A lot of people laughed at the title and they said, well, you were born rich, were you? The truth is, everyone's born rich. Most people are just a little short of money. We've got deep reservoirs of talent and ability within us.

When I wrote the book, I wrote the entire thing by hand. And you know, paper swells when it gets old. I had a file that had to be that thick and I had just finished the book.

I had the entire thing finished. I didn't have my name, I didn't have my address, my phone number, nothing on it. And I left the whole file in the back of a cab.

I couldn't tell you the color of the cab, the name of the cab, nothing. My wife said, Why aren't you upset? I said, you know, it's so terrible, it's going to be great. I said, the book mustn't have been any good.

So I wrote it all over again. I started all over and I really believed that everything happens for a reason. And that was so bad.

I thought, it has to be really good. If it's real bad, it's real good. It's a little bad.

Little good. This was terrible. So I rewrote it.

Do you know that book has sold millions of copies? It's been translated into I don't know how many different languages all over the world. It's helped build our business. I could tell you a dozen stories like this.

I've lost everything I had. Everything I've had. Two or three times I just got up and kept on going.

And at times I was wondering why I kept on going, and I didn't understand. I was just persistently going where I wanted to go. I wanted to build a company that operated all over the world.

I didn't know how to do it. I had no idea how to. I didn't have the resources to do it.

So I had to get out. I had to find those resources, and I had to keep on going. And the price I had to pay was you had to lose everything a couple of times.

And I did. I lost everything a couple of times, but I started all over again. I remember my brother one time saying that he never saw anyone with such tunnel vision as I had.

He said, you can't seem to take your eye off the target. It doesn't really matter what happens. And I got thinking about it and I thought, you know, he's right.

But as I go back now and I study and really look at these 13 principles in retrospect over my life, because I've been at this now for 57 years, which is a pretty long time, and I get thinking about it without these qualities ingrained right inside of me, I would never have kept on going. And you're not going to keep on going if you don't ingrain them within you. Now, when we ingrain something, we turn it into a habit.

Persistence is one of the most important habits. Now, I can't say it's more important than all the others, but at times it seems like it's more important. I guess at certain times in your life, each one would be more important than another.

But I do know this. It kept me going when everything looked dark. It kept me going when everything told me to quit.

I remember one time we had a brilliant idea. We were going to rent a ship and we were going to take people out, sell a seminar on a ship. We bring on different speakers, and we did, and it was fairly successful.

So we thought we should do it again. The next year, we got a bigger ship. It didn't work out too well.

We lost $2 million on that. And somebody said, Why isn't it bothering you? I said, I don't know. It just isn't.

We just lost. That's it. And I think when you get these qualities inside of you, you treat winning and losing exactly the same.

There's steps that you have to take to get to where you're going. It seems rather strange at times. In fact, it seems at times like you're right out of your mind.

But I think that's happened with everyone that's ever accomplished anything. I think it happened with the Wright brothers. It sure happened with Edison.

Can you imagine Edison's neighbors? What the heck is he doing? Why doesn't he get a job? He's down there in his basement plan. I'm telling you, I'd divorce him if I was married to him. Or how about the Wright brothers? Do you know their father was a bishop in some Reformed church? He told them they were going to burn in hell for suggesting that they could fly.

Nobody had ever done it. Everybody must have thought they were out of their mind. Study anyone that has ever accomplished anything.

Study Napoleon Hill's life. That's an interesting one to study. And you'll wonder what kept him going.

It was all these principles. And that's the composite of the thinking of 500 people that he studied some of the most successful of his day. That's what you've got here.

That's what you're incorporating into your thinking, into your plans for building your life. I think you're on a good track. Persistence is the sustained effort necessary to induce faith.

Without persistence, you will be defeated even before you start. With persistence, you will win. Get out your notebook.

Write Persistence apples at the top of the page, and then I'm going to use this principle of persistence in the following way. And then finish that sentence in your notebook. Don't overthink it.

Just tune into your own powerful intuition and record on paper what comes to you. Do it now.