“I did not expect that we would emerge on top. I would have been content for us to finish in the middle of the pack. But all the hard work, patience and perseverance of my players are paying off.”
The keys to health and weight-loss: stress reduction, sleep, deep breathing, clean water, complete nutrition, sunshine, walking, stretching, meditation, love, community, laughter, dreams, perseverance, purpose, humility, action.
Between goal and success, there is one critical thing - perseverance: it is the fundamental belief to always succeed, the determination to turn goal to gold, the greatness to never give up, the foresight to dream that enables you to make it happen.
Football is a great deal like life in that it teaches that work, sacrifice, perseverance, competitive drive, selflessness and respect for authority is the price that each and every one of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.
All of my Polynesian counterparts in the NFL with roots in American Samoa understand how the values embedded in our South Pacific culture - community, hard work, perseverance, respect - contribute directly to our success.
To remain indifferent to the challenges we face is indefensible. If the goal is noble, whether or not it is realized within our lifetime is largely irrelevant. What we must do therefore is to strive and persevere and never give up.
Hope is something that is demanded of us; it is not, then, a mere reasoned calculation of our chances. Nor is it merely the bubbling up of a sanguine temperament; if it is demanded of us, it lies not in the temperament but in the will... Hoping for what? For delivereance from persecution, for immunity from plague, pestilence, and famine...? No, for the grace of persevering in his Christian profession, and for the consequent achievement of a happy immortality. Strictly speaking, then, the highest exercise of hope, supernaturally speaking, is to hope for perseverance and for Heaven when it looks, when it feels, as if you were going to lose both one and the other.
More than commitment, dedication, character, discipline, patience, determination, perseverance and prayer, you need faith because you must first belief before you can witness a pragmatic change in your life.
Angela Duckworth has shown how important grit and perseverance are to lifetime outcomes. College students who report that they finish whatever they begin have higher grades than their peers, even ones with higher SATs.
The adventure is which I have shared so passionately is not over--this adventure with its doubt, failure, the dreariness of no progress, then a glimpse of light, a hope, a hypothesis confirmed; and then after weeks and months of anxious perseverance, the intoxication of success.