Patience and persistence, and taking that one extra step

I woke up a little after three this morning. Wide awake and stressing. Things I wanted to happen on the book weren’t happening. Developments in my social media that were supposed to be happening weren’t happening. Negative thoughts were coursing through my head. Was I wasting my time? Was I really sure I even wanted to have a successful career as an author and a public speaker? Wasn’t the job I had good enough? Wasn’t just continuing to do what I was doing all right?

Are you ever plagued with doubts like I had this morning? Do you ever wonder if you are going down a path that’s a dead end? Do you ever feel like just giving up? If you’ve answered yes to any of these questions, welcome to the club.

When I get in that space, thinking about just packing it up, I like to remember what I call my two requirements:

patience and persistence.

I need to be patient, and appreciate that things are not necessarily going to flow on my time table. At the same time, I have to be persistent, and realize that even if things don’t appear to be working out, I need to keep working at my dream.

Many wise people have spoken and written about my two requirements. John Quincy Adams is credited with saying, “Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.” I’m not sure if I heard it from him originally, or if I just came to realize on my own, that I needed to cultivate these two traits.

What really fascinates me is how so many people speak about how when you feel like quitting, it’s time to take that one extra step.

Thomas Edison wrote, “Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Or this one by Harriet Beecher Stowe, “When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.”

I think about all the amazing things people have accomplished, people who obviously didn’t give up. And I think about what Jane Addams, the second woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, said, “Nothing could be worse than the fear that one had given up too soon, and left one unexpended effort that might have saved the world.”

This one resonates with me. What if I take that one further step, say write a tweet, and one of my tweets is retweeted by some one with lots of followers? And lots of people find out about the model for self motivation and are able to achieve their dreams?

I know I do not want to have given up too soon. So when these feelings arise at 3:00 AM, I get out of bed, fire up the computer, and work on my amazing things.