How You Can Achieve Anything With Persistence

Very often I’ve seen people undertake a particular task and have given up very easily by the early setbacks. In my life, I’ve managed to master a few things.

Especially when I was younger, I was incredibly persistent and if there was something that someone could do, I had to try it for myself to and become a master at it. I’m not sure where this attribute came from but it was a good attribute and I’m glad that as a kid I nurtured it.

The first time I remember learning about my persistence was when I started playing soccer at school. A lot of the other kids could do kick ups with the ball and I couldn’t do them. So I decided to spend my afternoons after school teaching myself how to do it. After days of practice I finally managed to do it! I got to the point where I could do hundreds in one go easily and I could now actually do more than some of my friends, through teaching myself and sheer persistence.

After that I knew that if there was something that I wanted to be able to do I could do it if I just kept trying and trying I knew I would get there eventually through dedication and repetition. Since then there were a few other things I really wanted to be able to do and here is a list of a few of the things that I managed to get really good at and master in my own right.

1. Spinning a basketball on my finger

I loved watching basketball on t.v. and it was one of my favourite sports at school. I used to see the pro players like Michael Jordan and Penny Hardaway spin a basketball on their fingers for as long as they wanted. I decided that I wanted to be able to do the same! I was determined to learn how to do it so I went out and bought a basketball and started practising. There were no hoops where I lived so I couldn’t actually play b-ball, all I could do was bounce the ball and spin it on my finger. After a few weeks of practice I managed to spin the b-ball on my finger for at least a few minutes. I managed to pass it from finger to finger and do a few other tricks too. As I mentioned in one of my other posts I managed to do a little one on one with one of the Harlem Globe Trotters when he visited my school as a guest.

2. Juggling

I always wanted to be juggle balls, something up until that point in my life I had never been able to do. So I went out and bought a set of juggling balls and practised like mad. I Not only did I manage to learn to juggle 3 balls I managed to learn to juggle pretty much any 3 objects, of a reasonable size, and do some freestyle juggling too! Not only that, because I taught myself how to juggle, I also figured out a way of teaching people how to juggle within 3 minutes. Most people I’ve seen, who’ve tried to teach juggling tend to take a lot of time about it. Again it all came down to that lovely word….persistence!

3. The Budweiser Card Shuffle

This is my favourite thing I ever learned. There used to be a Budweiser beer commercial that came on in which a guy riding on a train was playing with a deck of cards. In the advert he did this card shuffle which really amazed me and I was adamant that I wanted to be able to do the card shuffle too! So one day, I noticed that we taped the commercial by mistake. So I played the commercial over and over again and studied the card shuffle. It took me about 2 days in total but after repeated viewing and mimicking, I managed to perfect the shuffle. This also led me to go on to being professional magician since I loved learning and doing card tricks so much.

4. Nun-Chukka

In my college days I made friends with a guy who was a martial arts expert. Not only did he do martial arts but he was also very good with weapons and one day he showed me what he could do with a pair of nun-chukka. (For those who don’t know, nun-chukka are the weapon where two sticks of about 12inches approx are joined in the middle by a chain. Bruce Lee was one of first people to make Nun-chukka famous on the big screen.) I was memorized. Yes, you guessed it, I had to learn how to do it! So I went to china town and bought myself a pair. I spent weeks practising as playing around with nun-chukka can be quite a painful experience but I kept at it regardless of how many bruised fingers and bones I had. But it didn’t stop there. A few years later, I saw a T.V. show in which I saw a woman who was an expert at 2 nun-chukka!! Yes 2! You’ve guessed it! 😆 I had to be able to do that, so I went out and bought two pairs of foam nun-chukka this time, to lessen the bruises, and I watched the clip of the lady and after hours of practice I manage to master the double nun-chukka move. I was most proud of myself! 🙂

This whole blog post probably sounds like me just blowing my own trumpet at how good at I am at some things, which I probably am 😛 but, I’m also demonstrating that the mindset of absolute persistence, that nothing will distract you, that no matter how many failures you suffer, you will keep going and get to your goal. If you truly want to accomplish something, you MUST get into the mindset that nothing but your goal is acceptable, the end result is the only result, failure is not an option, that you can and must persist until your goal is reached.

Persistence = Resistance = Enormous self growth.