Great works are performed not by strength but by perseverance. — Samuel Johnson
I recently discovered, much to my shock, that most people believe that perseverance is the #1 source of life success. I don't believe in stick-to-it-iveness as some magical thing that transforms all bad to good, all defeat into victory, and all hardship into golden sunsets.
Am I just needlessly contrarian or is there something to not worshipping at the altar of perseverance? In the following, we explore sports, investing and gardening as paradigms for exploring the contours of tenacity. Nobody endures through sunny days of uninhibited leisure. Perseverance means continued investment when things look like investing is a bad idea, a choice of how to use scarce resources: money, time, energy, passion. In business, persistence must be based on rational confidence. Business leaders who obstinately, blindly carry on are considered delusional, not heroic.
One way to develop such confidence is to follow a proven system, one that delivers results. The franchise model, which takes the guesswork out of starting a new enterprise, is such a system which can improve confidence. Trusting in a system reduces the risk of being seduced by the siren call of glory.
Sports is full of stories of steadfastness that all revolve around winning glory. Here we find that perseverance is great at an incredibly constrained space with clear rules of engagement and pathways for success, as many sports boil down to " win by following the rules better than the other guy/team".
Sports is also an excellent example of the survivorship bias in our love of perseverance. Of the two teams persevering, only one wins and tells its story of triumph. In the NFL it's even worse, as there are 32 teams and only 1 wins the prize. Statically speaking, the number of losers dwarfs the number of winners, yet all participants did their utmost to go the distance. Clearly, hard work and grit were necessary, but insufficient.
Clearly defining the difference between tactical and strategic victory can move us closer to differentiating when to persevere. Tactical victory is getting a desired object, meeting a goal. A strategic victory, by contrast, increases options for further action.
For a tactical victory, perseverance is often critical for success. Yet achieving a goal while simultaneously decreasing later options is also possible. The proverbial winning the battle while losing the war. The strategic level, then, is where pushing through at all costs becomes a hinderance rather than a help. When I watched baseball, back in the 90s, I was living in Japan. At that time (and maybe today, I don't know) a key difference between Japanese and American baseball (as far as I could tell) was that Americans played tactically and the Japanese strategically. Every American played to maximize their individual stats. The Japanese played to maximize the team's stats. The Japanese style of play often required not persevering, even sacrificing personal glory for a team win.
The result was something like the difference between optimizing for a local maxima and a global one. A chart like the one below provides a useful visual illustration of the difference. There, you see two bumps, with the local maximum being lower than the global maximum of the system.Getting stuck in a local maximum or minimum is always suboptimal.
Persevering while stuck in a local minimum or maximum is always sub-optimal.
Breaking out of requires expanding the search space and cutting off further effort. Finally, consider the world of gardening. Many plants like roses and tomatoes grow better when cut back, regularly and, to an untrained eye, ruthlessly. Similarly, allowing all ideas, projects, and activities to persist, (i.e. blind perseverance) is a recipe for mediocrity, a capitulation to wasting to one's full potential. Perseverance that doesn't know when to cut its losses is a kind of over-flow of compassionate energy that degenerates into lazy self-indulgence.
So, by all means, persevere towards tactical outcomes with clear rules and a pathway to success. Keep a weather eye out for opportunities to increase the scope of action available. And when necessary, trim away all distractions to provide greater focus, clarity and power.