“Perseverance is not a long race; it is many short races one after another.” Walter Elliot
Most men think perseverance is something you’re born with. Some men have it, some men don’t, and if you didn’t get it, you’re out of luck.
That’s not what it is.
Perseverance means: Put one foot in front of the other without quitting. You can misstep. You can pause for a break. But ultimately, he who perseveres keeps going. It’s a marathon, broken into small race by small race. You run the short one in front of you, then the next one, then the next one.
The gym has a word for that. A rep.
Nobody walks in and benches 225 on the first day. You do the rep you can do. Then you come back and do it again. The weight you couldn’t move in the spring is your warm-up by the fall. Not because you got lucky. Because you stacked short races until the long one was behind you.
This applies to life too. What’s the small rep we can do in our emotional and social lives?
I was getting my hair cut this week, and my hairdresser asked me something I haven’t stopped thinking about.
“Do you think some people just have a black cloud over their head?”
“Absolutely not,” I told her.
I’ve never met a man who stayed inside one bad mood or bad experience forever. Not one. Every man I know who went through something hard came out the other side. The ones who believe in the black cloud stop running the short races. They sit down in the middle of the hard thing, they believe they’ll always be in it, and so they attract more of it. They build their own prison in their minds.
Here’s what happened this week that drove that idea home for me.
Thursday night I spoke at a pilot program my friend Nick put together called Proximity. Ten business leaders, five minutes each, talking to a room full of high schoolers. I was the last one up, so my job was to tie it all together.
I always wear a suit for these. At the last minute, I thought, what does a seventeen-year-old want from a forty-four-year-old man in a suit? So I changed into what I wear at the farm. Cowboy boots, jeans, a polo. If I was going to tell those kids the truth, I wanted to look like the man who lives it.
I was the last public speaker of the night, so while I waited to go up, I listened and learned:
· Self-confidence is built through discipline
· Humility starts at the bottom
· Rejection is a positive thing
· One of them said discipline equals freedom
Then it was my turn. I got up and told them two things.
The first is that a victim mentality will never succeed. If you believe life is happening to you, because of your family, your luck, or whatever story you were handed, you’ll spend your whole life proving it. That’s bullsh#t. It’s a poison.
The second is the medicine: Life is happening for you. Even the dark seasons. Especially those. I believe our Creator designs the hardest times of our lives to make us into our best selves. That’s how we grow.
And I told them to get clear on what they actually want, not what their family has always done. College is great. So is becoming a master in a trade.
Here’s what I know from where I sit today. Every man on that stage got there the same way. Not one long race. Thousands of short ones.
Whatever you’re carrying right now, it isn’t forever. It feels like a long race because you’re staring at the whole thing at once. Stop staring at the whole thing. What’s the short race in front of you today?
This week’s lesson: You outlast a hard season one rep at a time.
