Why persistence is not enough to be successful

ricardotorres (59)in #life • 8 years ago

I'm totally convinced that in order to have success, you need to be persistent enough to achieve whatever you want. That's right, but people tend to confuse something about persistence, people think that only the persistence will take them to the places they want to be.

I'm sorry to say this, but that's something wrong. Depending just on the persistence as the only weapon which will lead you to achieve all your objectives would be a terrible mistake that you will pay dearly. There is an essential element, which we usually forget, to make persistence the powerful weapon it is.

Remember, "persisting" doing the wrong actions will lead you to the failure, but persisting doing the correct actions will take you to success, that's how it is.

Persisting by using the wrong tools will only lead you to frustration, but persisting by using the right tools will lead you to victory and happiness.

They key is in the actions and the tools used by us. Only correct actions combined with correct tools will get the best from persistence, if one of these is absent, persistence will lose a huge amount of effectiveness. And if persistence lose effectiveness, that will make you feel totally desperate and frustrated.

Once a time, I used to be a salesman. As many people know, we are exposed to a lot of rejections from many customers, nobody likes rejections and as a salesman I was aware of this fact, which I thought it was never be such a big deal.

Well, at the beginning it was pretty tough to complete a sale due to my low experience in the job. I totally undestood that I wouldn't be the best salesman overnight, so I remained "persistent". Months were passing before my eyes whereas I didn't have any sale, I was really frustrated with everything at the moment, I started to blame the products or even the customers for my struggles. Nevertheless, I stayed "persistent".

My tecnique was always direct and fast, but it wasn't working at all despite remaining "persistent" and loyal to my tecniques. One day I was ready to give up on my job, I went to my boss's office and told him everything I was going through. He told asked me why I hadn't changed my tecnique after all those failures for one which would had given me better chances of selling. I really didn't know what to answer, so I asked him for recommendation. He told me to learn about different tecniques of selling and then come back to his office in order to start over new.

I decided to buy a lot of books about selling or other salesman, I was truly focused on these topics so as to learn the best tecniques. The problem was my "fast and direct" approach which was scaring all my customers, making them to run away from me as possible. Then I changed to a more friendly approach, listening more the customers and guess what... My sales starting to rise after all.

It was a nice experience, life showed me that persistence wasn't enough to be successful, I needed other kind of abilities as well to combine it each other.

Sportsmen are always perfecting their tecniques in their respective sports, they are always learning from mistakes and being persistent enough to make themselve better, that's how it is. We should do the same if we don't want to be frustrated all the time when is about our goals or jobs.

You have always to check results after sometime, you don't want to get stuck as I was because of my own arrogance. The goals need to be realistic and measurable, but that's up to you.

As human beings we are always mistaking, don't let it to be a source of frustration, make it a source of learning instead. Imagine wanting to turn the car on with the wrong key... You could try all the times you want, but you will never turn the car one with the wrong key, you are going to need the right key to turn it on.

That's how life works.