Patience and Perseverance : Part 1

How to Get on in the World: A Ladder to Practical Success
by Major A.R. Calhoon

(Page 16 of 28)

If great success were possible only to men of great talents, then there would be but little success in the world.

It has been said that talent is quite as much the ability to stick to a thing, as the aptitude to do it better than another. "I will fight it out on this line, if it takes all summer." This statement of General Grant does not indicate the man of genius, but it does show the man of indomitable perseverance, a perseverance to which he owed all his success, for it is well known that he was a very modest, and by no means a brilliant man. The key to his character was pertinacity: the secret of his success was perseverance.

"I will today thrash the Mexicans, or die a-trying!" was what Sam Houston said to an aide, the morning of the battle of San Jacinto. And he won.

The soldier who begins the battle in doubt is half beaten in advance.

The man who loses heart after one failure is a fool to make a beginning.

There is a great deal in good preparation, but there is a great deal more in heroic perseverance. The man who declines to make a beginning till everything he thinks he may need is ready for his hand, is very apt to make a failure. The greatest things have been achieved by the simplest means. It is the ceaseless chopping that wears away the stone. The plodder may be laughed at, and the brilliant man who accomplishes great things at a leap admired; but we all remember the fable of the tortoise and the hare; the latter, confident of her powers, stopped to rest; the former, aware of his limitations, persevered and toiled laboriously on - and he won the race.

We do not wish to be understood as underestimating genius. We believe in it; but one of its strongest characteristics is perseverance, and the next is its capacity to accomplish great results with the simplest means.

"Easy come, easy go." Those things that are acquired without much effort, are usually appreciated according to the effort expended. Determination has a strong _will_; stubbornness has a strong _won't_. The one is characterized by perseverance, and it builds up; the other, having no purpose but blind self, ends in destruction.

It is a fact at once remarkable and encouraging that no man of great genius who has left his mark on his times, ever believed that his success was due to gifts that lifted him above his fellows. The means by which he rose were within the reach of all, and perseverance was a prime requisite.

The greatest results in life are usually attained by simple means, and the exercise of ordinary qualities. The common life of everyday, with its cares, necessities, and duties, affords ample opportunity for acquiring experience of the best kind; and its most beaten paths provide the true worker with abundant scope for effort and room for self-improvement. The road of human welfare lies along the old highway of steadfast well-doing; and they who are the most persistent, and work in the truest spirit, will usually be the most successful.

Fortune has often been blamed for her blindness; but fortune is not so blind as men are. Those who look into practical life will find that fortune is usually on the side of the industrious, as the winds and waves are on the side of the best navigators. In the pursuit of even the highest branches of human inquiry, the commoner qualities are found the most useful - such as common sense, attention, application, and perseverance. Genius may not be necessary, though even genius of the highest sort does not disdain the use of these ordinary qualities.

The very greatest men have been among the least believers in the power of genius, and as worldly wise and persevering as successful men of the commoner sort. Some have even defined genius to be only common sense intensified. A distinguished teacher and president of a college spoke of it as the power of making efforts. John Foster held it to be the power of lighting one's own fire. Buffon said of genius, "It is patience."

Newton's was unquestionably a mind of the very highest order, and yet, when asked by what means he had worked out his extraordinary discoveries, he modestly answered, "By always thinking unto them." At another time he therefore expressed his method of study: "I keep the subject continually before me, and wait till the first dawning open slowly by little and little into a full and clear light." It was in Newton's case as in every other, only by diligent application and perseverance that his great reputation was achieved.

Even his recreation consisted in change of study, laying down one subject to take up another. To Dr. Bentley he said: "If I have done the public any service, it is due to nothing but industry and patient thought." So Kepler, another great philosopher, speaking of his studies and his progress, said: "As in Virgil, 'Fama mobilitate viget, vires acquirit eundo,' so it was with me, that the diligent thought on these things was the occasion of still further thinking; until at last I brooded with the whole energy of my mind upon the subject."

The extraordinary results effected by dint of sheer industry and perseverance, have led many distinguished men to doubt whether the gift of genius be so exceptional an endowment as it is usually supposed to be. Therefore Voltaire held that it is only a very slight line of separation that divides the man of genius from the man of ordinary mold. Beccaria was even of opinion that all men might be poets and orators, and Reynolds that they might be painters and sculptors. If this were really so, that stolid Englishman might not have been so very far wrong after all, who, on Canova's death, inquired of his brother whether it was "his intention to carry on the business!"

Locke, Helvetuis, and Diderot believed that all men have an equal aptitude for genius, and that what some are able to effect, under the laws which regulate the operations of the intellect, must also be within the reach of others who, under like circumstances, apply themselves to like pursuits. But while admitting to the fullest extent the wonderful achievements of labor, and recognizing the fact that men of the most distinguished genius have invariably been found the most indefatigable workers, it must nevertheless be sufficiently obvious that, without the original endowment of heart and brain, no amount of labor, however well applied, could have produced a Shakespeare, a Newton, a Beethoven, or a Michael Angelo.

Published by the Christian Herald, Louis Klopsch, Proprietor, Bible House, New York.
Copyright 1895 by Louis Klopsch.