You know what’s not sexy? This. But do it anyway.

“Perseverance is the hard work you do after you get tired of doing the hard work you already did.”

— Newt Gingrich

Ah, September. The leaves outside my window are turning the colours of flames. For those of us affected by the school calendar (and living in North America), September (or somewhere around there) is a season of change.

For me, autumn always feels like a time of refocusing. Perhaps it’s the return to routine that causes the mental shift.

Whether you or your children have returned to school in the last month or not, we’re now at the three-quarters mark of the year. Have you re-assessed your yearly goals lately? How about your lifetime goals? When was the last time you thought about those?

I don’t know about you, but I think about mine a lot. When I’m in a season of refocusing, I attack the steps to get there with gusto and energy.

But when the steps you’ve been doing don’t seem to be producing the desired results, it is easy to get discouraged, and focus can melt into floundering. It makes me want to skip to the end, read the last page, and just finish this story already! Like Princess Fiona in Shrek: The Musical, I want to “Skip ahead! Skip ahead!”

Let’s take a look at some lessons from some of our favourite characters (fictional or not) to survive those floundering seasons, shall we?

Perseverance—The Most Admired Character Trait

When I googled perseverance quotes for this post, I was nearly overwhelmed by the number of excellent soundbites of sage wisdom that came up. And as I thought about it, I realized that in every story that gets told, every character we admire, the common thread is the character trait of perseverance.

At least for the “happy” endings. For the other ones, chances are they gave up eventually.

(Even one of my least-favourite literary stories, The Road, has a sad—not tragic—ending where the character persevered—he achieved his goal, in a sense, by choosing to retain his humanity in the face of a culture that seemed determined to strip it away from him. I think he did it in a stupid way, which is why I dislike the ending, but he did it, and that, at least, is admirable. I don’t want to spoil it for those who might want to read/watch it. Other people love it, so you might, too.)

Let’s face it, we probably consume and create far more stories where the main character didn’t give up than ones where they did.

“In other words, without perseverance, they would never have achieved their goal.”

Why? No matter what other character traits that person had, if they didn’t persevere, they wouldn’t have had a story worth telling.

In other words, without perseverance, they would never have achieved their goal.

Napoleon Hill is famous for saying “What the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve,” which is often now paraphrased as “If you can believe it, you can achieve it.”

While this is true on a simplistic level (yes, you can achieve anything that’s physically possible for you to achieve), it’s missing that key element required to go from belief to achievement: work.

Fortunately, Mr. Hill also talks about patience, persistence, and perseverance quite a bit in his work. However, I remember being a young artist with big dreams and a perspective tinted rosy by the “believe it-slash-achieve it” mantra and being frustrated that the results I wanted were taking so long to come.

It’s important to remember that between those two points of the journey (believing and achieving), there’s a whole lot of road that can have its exciting moments, but is often hard work or just plain boring. But each step still takes you closer to your goal.

One of my favourite movies of the last several years is Eddie the Eagle, the true story of an Englishman who did what he’d been repeatedly told was physically impossible for him to do: ski in the Olympic games.

It tells the story of Michael Edwards, a man who, from childhood, dreamed of being in the Olympics.

He had very little going for him as far as talent or circumstances, and a great deal against him.

His father continually got in his way and told him he was dumb for wanting this.

His peers actively blocked him.

He didn’t really have the physical ability to excel in his field.

Yet, through a little ingenuity and a whole lot of determination (including the willingness to take a physical beating over and over again), in 1988, he represented Great Britain in ski jumping at the Winter Olympic Games in Calgary, Alberta.

His stubborn determination to persevere was practically his only asset. And it paid off.

Perseverance. It’s the secret ingredient.

I could list story after story of perseverance, as I’m sure you could, too. That’s because almost every story, no matter how epic or suspenseful or sweet or romantic, has a character that gave it one more shot. No matter how many times they got knocked down, they got up again.

Can you imagine Jean-Claude Van Damme having a career if, at the end of every movie, when he’s been beaten to a bloody pulp, his character just stayed down? Of course not.

Let’s take that lesson and make it ours.

You might be in a season of focus and energy, and if you are, great.

Or you might be floundering, wondering why you haven’t achieved more or had more success by now.

Chances are, you’re going to continue to cycle through those two places. What do you do about them while you’re there?

Take those seasons of floundering as times to adjust course.

Perseverance is necessary, but being stupid isn’t. If you’re hitting a brick wall, get creative and try something else. But keep trying.

Use the inertia of seasons of focus, excitement, and energy to propel future success.

Write down your successes so you can remember them, learn from them, and mostly so you can be inspired and remember that they will return when you are floundering. We humans have an incredible “gift” for forgetting the positive things in our life, so record them for posterity.

But no matter where you are, keep going.

You can only drive a car that's moving.

You only become a hero if you keep getting up after you get knocked down.

And you only succeed if you keep putting in the daily, unsexy work required to get to your goal.

It’s through that daily drudgery and, yes, even the floundering, that we become who we need to be to finish our stories.

There’s no skipping ahead. We have to keep taking our lives one page day at a time, just like everyone else.

That’s how we get true satisfaction when we finally get where we want to go—in a story well lived.

“The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.”

— Emile Zola

This post was originally published in the Books & Inspiration Newsletter on 2019-09-12. Like what you read? Get regular inspiration in your inbox by signing up here.

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