3 specific ways to develop persistence
If God says he will give me some ability, I will ask for the strongest tenacity in the world without hesitation. Everything in the world takes time. No matter how much intrinsic motivation there is, there are tough parts to every process. When the urge to throw everything away and do nothing comes, the power to endure the process of arriving at the desired destination while blocking such negative emotions is persistence. When I was in school, I was often envious of smart friends. After being swept around by tough waves in my social life, I now respect a person with persistence who can withstand any environment better than a smart friend. How can we develop the tenacity that is the core bone of our lives?
The beginning of cultivating persistence is ‘quit’
After all, persistence is a sustainable force. When will we stray from the course we have to get through? Realistically, when we look back, we often fail to do what we really need to do because of sweet temptations rather than difficult moments. If you want to gain more, you have to give up more. This paradoxical statement is the truth of our life. If you cut off the instinctive desire for the achievement you want, the time for sustainable efforts will increase. Let’s not try to overcome everything with too abstract will, but let’s get rid of the elements that hinder us with proper environment settings in the first place. Such determination and practice is the beginning of developing persistence.
Think vividly of failures
You’ve probably heard a lot of stories that say that if you draw a clear picture of your dream, it will come true. It’s not wrong, but a more psychologically sure way is to imagine a concrete failure. Since we are accustomed to the loss avoidance bias, which is more painful to lose than to gain, if we vividly picture the pain that follows when we fail to do what we need to do, then the persistence we didn’t have will creep up from our whole body. Personally, I often hear that my tenacity is very strong, but in the past, my mental strength was not as strong as this. However, as the company grew little by little, there were many people and tasks that I had to be responsible for, and when the thought of failure started to settle in my head, I often worked on my own even though I was really tired. In the past, I could handle failure because it was my own failure, but now the size of the failure has grown so much that just thinking about ruin is so painful that there is no way I can stop working hard. (That’s how much I love my family and customers. I can’t imagine losing them.)
Separate what you can and can’t do
More people than you think think they have no persistence. However, it is not that there is no persistence, but more often the goal setting is wrong. After all, to keep something going, you have to be immersed. Immersion doesn’t come from making up your mind, but you naturally fall into it when the difficulty of the job and your ability are balanced to some extent. Setting an absurd goal, trying a little, then getting frustrated and saying you have no persistence is an act of very poor metacognition. Once you accurately distinguish what you can and cannot do, the probability of immersion increases. When you are immersed in yourself, time naturally goes by quickly, and then you feel like you did a lot in a shorter amount of time even if you do the same thing. Of course, it is true that if you are immersed in a concentrated state, you can work sustainably for a longer period of time because you do not know how time passes. However, you don’t have to think of persistence too simply as a force that lasts for a long time. The amount of effort is the same, but if productivity has clearly risen through deeper immersion, it is not unreasonable to say that you worked relatively longer than in the past. It would be nice to think of focusing on what you can do and increasing your productivity as a different way to increase your perseverance.