Never, never, never give up. Thank you Winston.

The godfather of the self-development genre is arguably Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill's most well known book is Think and Grow Rich published in 1937. Most of the self-help "gurus" cite this work as a big influence in their work. People like Anthony Robbins and Brian Tracy have been influenced by this book.

I was reading the chapter yesterday on Persistence. Persistence is very important in anything you do and without it you are going to be up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

One of the first things that struck me was that persistence can sometimes be misunderstood for ruthless and cold-blooded behaviour. That is so true. When we observe someone trying to get what they want we look at it from our rose tinted glasses and we think what an idiot, when in fact we should be applauding these people for going after exactly what they want.

The second thing I noticed is that the lack of persistence is a real weakness in most of us. Napoleon Hill says that this can be overcome by effort. I must admit that this blog has required a lot of persistence. They have been a few times over the last 38 days that I have seriously thought about why I am doing this and whether I should continue with this challenge especially when there hasn't been any obvious things to blog about. Napoloen Hill says however that the starting point of all achievement is desire and my desire is to beat a friend of mine who is also blogging daily as well. We are keeping each other going. This is my Master Mind if you like. Another one of Hill's suggestions in his book.

If you attain the habit of persistence, Hill says that you can never fail because it will always allow you to stand up and go again and that is the secret isn't it? Stand up and go again. It is just a temporary defeat.

What really struck a cord with me about this chapter yesterday was the list of the symptoms of lack of persistence and the last one was fear of criticism. People won't do things for the fear of being criticised by people around them. Usually this just exists in our mind and it isn't a physical fear like jumping out of an airplane for example. I mean, you will never see me jump out of an airplane because it scares the sh*t out of me. However if I advertise my blog, what's going to happen? Let me think about that for awhile. Well, some people might actually read it. That's good isn't it? What am I scared of? Also, I'm providing content for the internet. I'm a producer as opposed to a user. That's good too, isn't it?

We are scared to take chances because of the fear of criticism when in fact rather than criticising, we should be congratulating them.

There is a little story in the chapter about Wallis Simpson and her persistence to get what (or who) she wanted. So she should have been congratulated too, but I'm sure that wasn't the case in 1930's Britain. I wonder what would have happened and how history would have changed if King Edward VIII stayed on as king. They should make a movie about that like this movie:

If you know what you want and want it enough then don't give up. Go after it because you can't lose and the people who doubt you and criticise you will suddenly be on your side.