S is for Stubborn–and Success

There’s no shortcut to success. It’s just a lot of hard work. Unless your definition of success is laying on a sofa eating chips and watching TV all day. That’s not a lot of hard work. But for those of us with slightly higher goals in mind, hard work is an unavoidable prerequisite for reaching our goals.

But the thing about hard work is that…it’s hard. And often boring. And a lot of people give up their goals and walk away when success doesn’t happen fast.

So I think one of the biggest factors in success is stubbornness. Not like a 4-year-old temper tantrum “I-don’t-wanna-clean-up” stubborn, but that plodding sort of stubbornness that never looks heroic while it’s happening. You know the kind that makes you think, “What the heck am I doing this for? I’m not getting anywhere!”

Hey, as long as you’re moving forward, you’re getting somewhere.

I have a long way to go in reaching my goals, but I am a miles closer to them than I was a few years ago. And it’s all because I’m stubborn. I made my monster To-Do lists and chipped away at them. I faced pages of edit notes and chipped away. I connected with one person, then another, then another, to create a network of colleagues (and now friends) to help me along my path. I wrote in the scattered moments of free time my child allowed. I created an outline for a new book that seemed an insurmountable 62 chapters/scenes long and simply wrote one chapter at a time (I only have 48 left to write).

In other words, I never stopped moving forward. Sometimes I crawled, sometimes I inched, and sometimes I simply clung on for dear life, but I never went backward.

Stubborn.

And I’m close to realizing my goals and dreams.

So the next time someone calls you stubborn, thank them.

It’s a compliment.

Do you think the stubborn factor is necessary for success?

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