On Perseverance
I was reading a syllabus and I came across a section about who the best achievers are. According to the professor, it wasn’t those that blew him away with one assignment. It was those who consistently put in good faith effort, throughout the entire term. Even if any assignment wasn’t particularity mind blowing, they did well because they kept trying.
Consistency is something I always try to strive for. I’ve had periods in my life where I was consistent and I tend to view those periods positively. Time and time again I have found myself in stressful situations that could’ve been avoided if I had just been consistent. Especially in relation with school. I would often find myself cramming because I hadn’t made the effort to study consistently throughout the term.
Here’s the thing: consistency requires the acknowledgment of one truth. Difficulty is part of the process. While studying, there will be some days where things just don’t click or some assignments where we don’t do super well on. Oftentimes the first reaction is to just give up. Wait for tomorrow. “Do it later.” It’s takes an extra level of cognition to realize that the difficulty is actually good. Learning new content is not supposed to be easy, it’s an active process that requires you to connect ideas to what you already know.
Nothing in life worth having is going to be easy. That goes for studying, working out, making friends, etc. Basically every facet of life has some semblance of difficulty to it. If it is not inherently difficult, doing it consistently is going to be.
Going to bed and waking up on time is seems deceptively easy. As many of you have probably experienced, there’s usually a brief period of time where the sleep schedule is adhered to, then it breaks. That’s been happening to me for years and I’m still working on it. Adhering to a sleep schedule once is easy, but doing it for an extended period of time is increasingly difficult.
Working out is another one of those habits. Going to a workout session once or for a week isn’t that bad. Continually going to work out for multiple years is difficult and rare. It requires prioritization, boundaries, and learning. The activity itself is supposed to be difficult for it to be effective. Because it is difficult to do and maintain but has incredible benefits we have large numbers of people setting it as their New Year’s resolution just to not show up in a couple weeks. It’s so recognized that gyms operate with that factored in. Most gyms aren’t actually able to accommodate all their members at once.
Let’s go back to studying. Multiple studies have shown that small amounts of studying spread out over an extended period of time results in better performance. Yet the norm for the majority of students is cramming right before a test or assignment. Logically it doesn’t make sense, but in psychologically, it’s obvious. Cramming is easy. The process of cramming is just putting things off till the last moment. It doesn’t even take any effort, brains are predisposed to taking the easy way out.
It’s easy to be intense for a short period of time and give up. Showing up everyday and putting in the work, though, that takes real effort. Showing up when things aren’t going so well, that takes real effort. Showing up knowing that whatever you do might not work out, that takes real effort.
Again, nothing in life worth achieving is going to be easy. That true in academia, that’s true in our personal lives, that true in relationships, and that’s even true in economics. The harder and more in demand it is to have a particular skillset, the more valued it is in the economy. This is why engineering and medicine are such stable fields. They are hard and needed. In order to have those skill sets, consistent efforts need to be made. Effort spread out over years, even decades.
To remember that doing it yesterday was hard, doing it today is going to be hard, and doing tomorrow is also going to be hard and still go ahead and do it. That’s discipline.
To keep working on a project when its success is uncertain, when failure could be embarrassing, when other people are watching. That’s courage.
It takes a certain amount of self-belief, self-respect, self-love to be able to wake up everyday and keep going at it. Keep putting the reps in. Keep showing up for you, your friends and your family. That’s dedication.
Discipline, courage, and dedication. When you put those together, that’s my definition of perseverance.
In Middle School I won the Caleb award. For being perseverant. I didn’t know the multiplication tables so I borrowed multiplication flashcards from my teacher and memorized them over the winter break. My teacher recognized that and gave me the award.
My name is Caleab (a riff on Caleb) so hopefully I continue to embody perseverance.