according to this man class is calling on 
reserve energy. Class is the ability to overcome   any number of challenges during a race. Class 
doesn't mean you never get tired, but it does   mean you never show it. Class doesn't mean you're 
not tempted to quit sometimes, but it does mean   you never actually do, and in the final 
yards of a race, class makes the difference. The title of this session is perseverance, 
but it could very well have been class, because they seem to be very similar 
qualities. Whatever word you want to use, this is an extremely important element of strong 
character. I also suspect that in recent years, we've overlooked the importance of perseverance 
to some extent because we believe so strongly in talent as the true determinant of success. For 
instance, there are a great many special programs in the schools for so-called gifted children, and 
these programs can begin as early as the first grade. A child is tested, and he's either gifted 
or he isn't. He either has talent or he doesn't.

our expectations of him change based on how he 
does on those tests, and his expectations for   himself change also. Of course, there are some 
educational systems that place a little less   faith in talent and a little more faith in long 
hard work. And since those systems have been the   source of some incredible progress in recent 
years, I think it's important to look closely   at perseverance and how you can get some of that 
stuff, whatever your gifts and talents may be. But can you really develop perseverance after 
all? That quality is something that's bred into   racehorses over many generations. Can the 
human equivalent of class and perseverance   really be learned the way you can learn to drive a 
car or play a musical instrument? To a great extent,   I think perseverance can be learned, and there are 
some very powerful techniques that can help you   learn it. By far, the most important tool 
you can use in developing perseverance   is a personal list of challenging, realistic, 
well-defined, and highly rewarding goals.

goals are major to a genuinely success-oriented person. Without them, you're just playing around. The difference between a goal-directed individual and someone without goals is like the difference between a Wimbledon champion and a kid batting a tennis ball around on a court with no net, no opponent to bring out the best in him, and no way of keeping score. Despite everything that's been written about the importance of goal setting, very few people actually put it into practice. It's always amazed me the way the average guy puts more thought and effort into planning his two-week vacation than he devotes to planning his life. What's he taking a vacation from? He hasn't really decided what he's trying to do in life, but for two weeks out of the year, he just decides he wants to do something else, and this is what he plans very carefully. Challenge creates strong character, and goals represent challenge in its most positive form. Leaders have their personal goals clearly in focus, as well as the goals

of the organization. In fact, one of the principal responsibilities of leadership is defining goals for the vast majority of people who aren't able to do it for themselves. Over the years, I've developed some ideas about effective goal setting, and I'd like to share those with you in a moment. I also want to point out some traps of goal-directed behavior that aren't usually talked about, but there certainly ought to be. When I was a kid, I used to dream what it would be like to buy a ticket on a railroad train and just go someplace. I really didn't think about where I'd be going or how long it would take to get there. I just loved the idea of getting on the train and just letting it take me someplace. I guess there's still something appealing about that idea, but it's not really the way you want to live your life as a mature human being. When you grow up, you buy a ticket on a train or a

plane because you want to go someplace, and you know exactly where you're going. You may have to change planes in a different city. Your flight may be canceled, and you may have to switch to another flight. You may not feel like talking to the person seated next to you, but you will persist. You know where you're headed, and you're quite determined to get there. That's goal-directed behavior in its simplest form. There are short-term goals and long-term goals. Sometimes you're flying across the country; other times you're just walking down to the corner grocery store. Long-term goals are the equivalent of a major journey. When you reach the point where you've achieved your long-term goals, your life will be fundamentally changed, and the process of getting to that point will transform you into a stronger, wiser, higher-performing person than you are now. How can you identify your long-term goals on a sheet of paper or in a notebook? Write these

five headings. Number one: What do I want to do? Number two: What do I want to be? Number three: What do I want to see? Number four: What do I want to have? And number five: Where do I want to go? Now, under each of these categories, write down several possible long-term goals. Be very relaxed about this. Just allow your mind to flow and come up with three to six ideas for each category. Don't worry about a lot of details at this point, and don't spend too much time describing a particular goal. In category number one, for example, what do I want to do? Suppose you want to write a book about the history of your family going back to the arrival of your great-grandparents in the United States. Just quickly jot down family history. Then, as you look down the list of categories, it occurs to you that you've always wanted to see the pyramids in Egypt. So you write pyramids. Keep writing down ideas as long as the list of categories continues to inspire you. You'll probably be surprised at

some of the things that turn up you may have kept a great many desires and aspirations hidden in the back of your mind. But the opportunity to write them down will move them to the forefront of your consciousness. That's one of the benefits of this technique. When you're satisfied with your list of long-term goals, read through the list once again. Then, beside each item, write the number of years that you believe it will take you to achieve that particular goal. It's best to round off the numbers into one-year, three-year, five-year, tenure categories. For example, you may estimate that it will take you ten years to research and write the book on your family history, but you'll need only five years to get yourself into a position where you can take a trip to the pyramids. Create a time frame like this for every one of your long-term goals. Immediate goals, those that will take less than a year to achieve, are important too of course and we'll deal with those separately in a moment. When you're finished

entering your time frames, there should be a fairly balanced distribution of all your goals. If there are many one- and three-year objectives but only a few in the ten-year category, maybe you need to think more about what you really want your life to add up to, what kind of life you really want to build over the long run. But if there's a preponderance of 10-year goals and relatively few of the shorter-term variety, this may be an indication that you're putting things off, that you're focused too much on where you'll be at the end of the day and not enough on what you can accomplish right now. Keep working on your list, adding and subtracting goals with various time frames until you've created a more or less even distribution. Now comes the really challenging and interesting part. So far, you've just been adding things to the list, but now it's time to start making some selections. Now you're going to start

asking yourself what's really important compared to what might just be sort of fun. Choose four goals from each of the four time frames: one year, three years, five years, and ten years. Now you have 16 separate goals. So far, you've only referred to them in shorthand fashion, but now you're going to start seeing them very, very clearly in your mind's eye. You're going to see each goal just as if it were being realized this very minute, and you're going to write down a detailed description of exactly what you see. Do you intend to open a handmade furniture store in three years? What will the store look like from the street out front? Will there be gold leaf lettering on the windows, or will there be a sign hanging over the door instead? How many square feet will the store contain? Will there be a showroom area for the furniture in front and a workspace in the back, or will the furniture be built at a different location? Do you intend to have any employees or

will you run the business entirely by yourself? Think of all the questions that need to be answered in order to see your goal with absolute clarity. And then write the information down in a notebook or on a piece of paper that will become one of your most important personal possessions. But that's not all. Any goal is a powerful motivator only if there's a powerful reason behind it. Why do you want to achieve your goals? Why do you want to own a handmade furniture store, or a private airplane, or a newspaper in a small town in Vermont? Why do you want to compete in a triathlon, or visit the Australian Outback, or be the first woman in your family to earn a PhD? Write down your reasons for wanting each goal in the same degree of detail that you use to write your descriptions. If you can't find a clear and convincing reason for each of your 16 goals, do some serious reevaluating. You may have more whims or pipe dreams than real goals. And now is

the time to make that discovery keep working on your list until you have 16 clearly envisioned strongly motivating long-term goals. Review what you've written at times and keep track of your progress toward these objectives. Above all, persevere. Goal setting is a very important first step, but goal achievement is a continuous lifelong process. That's what makes it so challenging. That's also why it's so extremely rewarding to finally attain your long-term goals. With regard to immediate goals, those who require anywhere from a day to a year to achieve, I recommend creating lots of objectives that can be accomplished in a month or less. Write them down, read what you've written at frequent intervals, keep track of your progress, and do something often that brings you closer to realizing these very short-term objectives. That way, you'll always have something to celebrate. These goals are not only important in their own right, they're also confidence builders and motivators toward a lifestyle based on perseverance.

and achievement. Let me close this discussion 
by emphasizing the fundamental importance   of goal setting for success, leadership, and 
creating strong character. Let me also emphasize   the fact that perseverance is about as important 
to goal achievement as gasoline is to driving   a car. Sure, there will be times when you feel like 
you're spinning your wheels, but you'll always get   out of the rep with genuine perseverance. Without 
it, you won't even be able to start your engine.   That situation and how to avoid 
it is what we'll be talking about   in a moment. The opposite of perseverance is 
procrastination. Perseverance means you never quit,   procrastination usually means you 
never get started. Although I consider   the inability to finish something to be a form of 
procrastination, ask people why they procrastinate,   and you'll often hear something like this: I'm 
a perfectionist. Everything has to be just right   before I can get down to work. No distractions, not 
too much noise, no telephone calls interrupting me.

and of course, I have to be feeling well physically too. I can't work when I have a headache. The other end of procrastination, being unable to finish, also has a perfectionist explanation. I'm just never satisfied. I'm my own harshest critic. If all the eyes aren't dotted and all the t's aren't crossed, I just can't consider that I'm done. That's just the way I am, and I'll probably never change. Do you see what's going on here? A fault is being turned into a virtue. The perfectionist is saying that his standards are just too high for this world. This fault into virtue syndrome is a common defense when people are called upon to discuss their weaknesses, but in the end, it's just a very pious kind of excuse-making. It certainly doesn't have anything to do with what's really behind procrastination. The basis of procrastination could be fear of failure. That's what extreme perfectionism really is once you take a hard look at it. What's the difference?

whether you're afraid of being less than perfect, or afraid of anything else, you're still paralyzed by fear. What's the difference whether you never start or never finish, you're still stuck, you're still going nowhere, you're still overwhelmed by whatever task is before you, you're still allowing yourself to be dominated by a negative vision of the future in which you see yourself being criticized, or laughed at, or punished, or written out of town on a rail. Of course, this negative vision of the future is really a mechanism that allows you to do nothing. It's a very convenient mental tool. Well, I'm going to tell you how to overcome procrastination. I'm going to show you how to turn procrastination into perseverance, and if you do what I suggest, the process will be virtually painless. I'm going to be very specific about how you can do this. A moment ago, I referred to a negative vision of the future as a mental tool for inactivity.

if you've been using that tool, I'm going to ask you to toss it aside, and start using two other very powerful principles that foster productivity and perseverance instead of passivity and procrastination. The first principle is break it down. No matter what you're trying to accomplish, whether it's writing a book, climbing a mountain, or painting a house, the key to achievement is your ability to break down the task into manageable pieces and knock them off one at a time. Focus on accomplishing what's right in front of you at this moment and ignore what's off in the distance someplace. Substitute real-time positive thinking for negative future visualization. That's the first all-important technique for bringing an end to procrastination. Suppose I were to ask you if you could write a 400-page novel. If you're like most people, that would be an impossible task. As soon as I ask you that question, a picture appears in your

mind of a big fat book lying on a coffee table, hundreds and hundreds of words covering every page. Yes, somebody must have written the book that you see in your mind's eye, but that person surely wasn't you. But suppose I ask you a different question. Suppose I ask if you can write a page and a quarter a day for one year. Do you think you could do it? Now the task is starting to seem more manageable. We're breaking down the 400-page book into bite-size pieces, but even so, I suspect many people would still find the prospect intimidating. Do you see why writing a page and a quarter may not seem so bad, but you're being asked to look ahead one whole year? When people start to look that far ahead, many of them automatically go into a negative mode. So let me formulate the idea of writing a book in yet another way. Let me break it down even more. Suppose I were to ask you, can you fill up a page in a quarter with words not

for a year, not for a month, not even for a week, but just today. Don't look any further ahead than that. I believe most people would confidently declare that they could accomplish that. And of course, these would be the same people who feel totally incapable of writing a whole book. Then, if I said the same thing to those people tomorrow, if I told them, I don't want you to look back, I don't want you to look ahead, I just want you to fill up a page and a quarter this day, do you think you can do it? One day at a time. You've probably heard that phrase. That's what we're doing here. We're breaking the time required for a major task down into one day segments, and we're breaking the work involved in writing a 400-page book down into page and a quarter increments. Keep this up for one year, and you'll write the book. Discipline yourself to look neither forward nor backward, and you can accomplish things.

you never thought you could possibly do one of. The beauties of this technique is the fact that you can really take it to the extremes if you have to. If writing a page and a quarter during one day still seems too much for you, break it down even more. Try to write three sentences in the next hour. Don't look any further ahead than that. Come up with the way of looking at the task that finally seems manageable. Then all you have to do is persevere. Procrastination won't be a problem because the task is now so small that fear won't kick in. And it all begins with those three words: break it down. My second technique for defeating procrastination is also only three words long. The three words are write it down. We've seen how important writing is to goal setting. The writing you'll do for beating procrastination is very similar, but instead of focusing on the future, you are now going to be writing about the present just as you experience it every day. Instead of

describing the things that you want to do, or the 
places you want to go. You're going to describe   what you actually do with your time, and you're 
going to keep a written record of the places you   actually go. In other words, you're going to 
keep a diary of your activities, and you're   going to be amazed by the distractions, detours, 
and downright waste of time that you come up   with during the course of a day. All of these 
get in the way of achieving your goals. For   many people, it's almost like they planned it that 
way, and maybe at some unconscious level, they did. The great thing about keeping a time diary is that 
it brings all this out in the open. It forces you   to see what you're actually doing and what 
you're not doing. The time diary doesn't have   to be anything elaborate. Just buy a little spiral 
notebook that you can easily carry in your pocket   when you go to lunch, when you drive across 
town, when you go to the dry cleaners.

when you spend some time shooting the breeze at 
the copy machine, make a quick note of the time   you began the activity and the time it ended. 
Try to make this notation as soon as possible,   but if it's inconvenient to do it immediately, you 
can do it later, but you should make an entry in   your time diary at least once every 30 minutes, 
and you should keep this up for at least a week.   What else do you have to do to gain the benefits 
of this extremely powerful productivity technique?   Nothing. You don't have to do anything else at 
all. It's just a process for making yourself   aware of how you actually spend your time. 
You will naturally and effortlessly begin to   reorganize your life. Perhaps that seems 
like too much to believe, but it's true.   When you're forced to write down the fact 
that you hung out at the coffee machine   for 15 minutes today, you'll think twice about 
doing that again tomorrow when you've got to.

put it in writing that you worked on an 
important project for 30 minutes today, and then took a break to read the newspaper. You'll 
persevere a little longer on the project tomorrow, and forget about the newspaper. Just try keeping a 
time diary for one week, and you'll see how it can revolutionize your ability to focus and achieve 
your goals. Break it down, write it down. Very easy to understand, very straightforward, but these are 
powerful and effective productivity techniques. This is how you put an end to procrastination. 
This is how you get yourself started. But how do you keep going? How do you 
keep your motivation consistently high? How do you learn to persevere 
when the novelty is worn off, and you're still some distance from your 
goal? We'll talk about that in a moment. The Irish poet William Butler Yeats once wrote 
a poem describing some of the unfortunate characteristics of the modern world. One of the 
things Yeats noticed was the fact that bad people

seem to have the most energy while 
good people become discouraged, and doubtful of their own abilities. The best lack 
all conviction, while the worst are filled with a passionate intensity. Those are the words Yates 
used, and it's true that we can look around the world and see all sorts of things happening that 
we might wish were not happening, and there are people working very hard to make those things 
happen for reasons that we might not admire. And when we see that, it's easy to start saying, 
what's the use, what hope do I really have, why don't I just give up on all the things I've been 
trying to accomplish, and just start taking it easy. Even people of strong character feel that 
way sometimes. All of us have moments like that, that's when perseverance gets really, really 
tough. What's the answer? Well, you recall that during our discussion of goal setting, I asked you 
to list five categories for your long-term goals.

what do you want to do? What do you want to be? What do you want to see? What do you want to have? Where do you want to go? Now, I want you to add another one: with whom do you want to share? In other words, who are you working for besides yourself? In the first five categories, you were asked to focus exclusively on your own aspirations and why they were important to you. But now, I want you to think in terms of other people. Who is depending on you? Who will benefit if you persevere and succeed? Who will suffer if you give up and stop trying? Who can you reach out to and help once you've achieved your goals? Write down answers to these questions just like you wrote answers for the other categories. For many people, the answers will appear quite readily. If you have a family, your spouse and your children are depending on you. Perhaps even your parents are depending on you now if they're elderly and require some care. But even if you're a single person or just starting out in your career.

you can think of reasons to persevere and 
succeed that go beyond your personal needs. Maybe you would like to share some of your 
financial success with the schools that educated 
you, or with the religious institutions that 
gave you spiritual guidance, or with a hospital 
that helped to heal you on some occasion. This 
sharing doesn't have to be limited to money either. 
If your work has given you certain skills, you 
can share your time and your abilities. You can 
and you should, but even this 
isn't putting it strongly enough. It 
isn't just that you'll do better if you feel 
you're working for others in addition to yourself. 
You absolutely must find reasons outside 
yourself to persevere if you want to keep 
going when the going gets tough. Hemingway wrote 
a man alone hasn't got a chance, and that doesn't 
mean only that you need people to help you in life. 
It means also that you need people you can help. 
You need people who can become the real reasons 
for perseverance above and beyond your material.

possessions or your financial success. What's in 
it for me can only take you so far. What's in it   for somebody besides me can take you as far as 
you need to go. In the last days of World War II,   the American cruiser Indianapolis was sunk by an 
enemy submarine. This was one of the most tragic   incidents of the war for American forces, 
in which hundreds of men lost their lives.   Many who made it through the initial attack had to 
spend days and nights in the water before rescuers   arrived. The experience of trying to stay alive 
in the water was so overwhelming that many people   simply gave up. In fact, the survivors reported 
later that virtually everyone wanted to give up   at one time or another. But whenever someone 
wanted to quit trying, the others would talk   to him about the people back home who needed 
him, who were depending on him to survive,   and if there was no one who was depending on him 
right then, they would talk about people in the

future who would someday be needing him. People he hadn't met yet, people who hadn't even been born yet. They conjured up all sorts of reasons above and beyond simply surviving. This motivation beyond the self was the only motivation that was strong enough. And what was true in an extreme sense for those men in wartime is also true in all our lives, no matter what we're trying to accomplish. We began this discussion with some mention of racehorses and how the best of them can overcome any challenge in a race. I don't know what motivates a racehorse, whether it's a bale of hay just beyond the finish line or the thought of resting in a warm stall, but I doubt there's much thought of what he can do for the other horses. Well, that's one big difference between horses and people. People depend on one another, and people of strong character take pride in what they can do for others. Challenge yourself.

to become a person like that and come what 
may, you will have the strength to persevere.

The Power of Perseverance (Jim Rohn Personal Development )

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