What do you do when the chips are down? Do you keep rolling the dice? Or do you throw your hands up in the air and capitulate?
To yield to a difficult situation or an undesired outcome - in my view - is the cowards way out. Life does not owe anyone anything. Life is not waiting for you or me to ask for something and we will be graciously obliged. It is totally the opposite. Life will ask you to sweat, to squirm and you will be taken to the edge of a cliff face before handing out the reward we may have been asking for. Life will throw curveballs not once, not twice but multiple times in our lives. Life will throw a spanner into the works when we covered all our bases thinking nothing will go wrong. Yet things do go awry, again and again.
You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated. In fact, it may be necessary to encounter the defeats, so you can know who you are, what you can rise from, how you can still come out of it. ~ Maya Angelou
Just because our plans do not go accordingly do we stop and give up? Of course not. Giving up would mean that today we would not have the light bulb invented by Thomas Edison. Giving up would not have allowed Roger Bannister to break the four-minute mile, and others to have followed him to beat his time again and again. Giving up would mean homo sapiens not leaving Africa to populate the world.
Most of what we have to endure can be endured and as the old Persian Sufi saying goes, "This, too, shall pass", more often than not most of our worries do tend to pass. It is usually at the eleventh hour when a solution will arise, and it may come from the left field, from somewhere we had no inkling of an answer to materialise from.
Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th. ~ Julie Andrews
There will be naysayers who tell you to give up, there will be doubters who scoff behind your back and there will those who ridicule you in public. Critics for me are good for motivation. The more someone says I cannot do it, the more bloody-minded I become in my pursuit of what I have set out to do.
The path to the end result you seek may change. Adjusting the plans as you make progress is not the end of the world, it is a prerequisite of getting there. On my road trip to Bangladesh from England in 2005/06, my car or so I thought had died in the frozen high plateau of eastern Turkey. My friend and I panicked that our trip was over, he even considered getting on a plane and going back to England. It was not until we limped our car to a gas station, where the proprietor told us to sit, relax and after drinking steaming hot sweet Turkish tea he gave us the solution to get our car moving again. Our worst fears did not materialise and we were saved. Further along our journey in southern Iran, we had driven 12 hours and arrived at the wrong border crossing, running dangerously low on fuel we drove 500km back the way we had come and again the kindness of two Baluchi brothers saved our skin. What we did do was to keep moving forward and not losing sight of our end destination.
If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
Success is the final evidence of the hours, days, weeks, months and even years slaving away quietly, chipping away at the seemingly insurmountable task at hand. Our society - globally - is obsessed with instant gratification, the immediate elixir to be drunk until the next fix. Yet few realise that it is those hours alone at practice, at work, at failing and trying again that results in the masterpiece of whatever we are aiming for.
A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence. ~ Jim Watkins
What if my goal isn't right? I don't feel good about it and I want to change it? Your goal is your goal and if you want to change it, then change it. However, do think about not trying to flip-flop from one thing another. The key tenet is to 'keep rolling the dice' until the double six shows up. Most endeavours are a numbers game, it's all about how many times you pick up the phone and make those sales calls, it's how many times you knock on doors, it's how many times you take that practice shot. Eventually, you will hit the bullseye.
On that note, I would like to leave you with a quote by the 30th president of the United States of America, Calvin Coolidge.
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. ~ Calvin Coolidge