Perseverance is a blinding force. Its necessity cannot be debated when attempting to launch a venture, win a woman’s heart, or succeed at any number of life’s races. It is innate in all of us, from children begging for a new toy to adults demanding a raise in pay. Perseverance is what helps us ride the more trying waves of life as well as achieve and attemptedly satisfy our exhaustive list of personal goals.
Perseverance mode is such a powerful setting that it can blind even the most aware individuals. Take, for example, the man trying to win a woman’s love. In this scenario, a well adjusted man’s perseverance has a short life span, with the all too possible outcome of quickly turning from cute to serious to restraining order. Or take the entrepreneur. To him, his business is a flawless money making enterprise, yet the market refuses to buy into his vision. Draining himself of his energies and cash, he is left with an idea and nothing more.
The successful employment of perseverance boils down to one finite principle: objectivity. We must successfully nurse perseverance, advantaging the emotion and fire that it provides, all while keeping an outsider’s perspective on our progress, or lack thereof.
Perseverance is no different than a performance enhancing drug. It can even the field or help crush the competition. Take too much of it and your (mental) testicles will shrink to the size of raisins, leaving you defeated and (mentally) shrunken.
OlderBrothersAdvice 
Isn’t this why we need friends (true friends, that is)? How is a lone wolf to see himself in context?
You have touched on a topic that I have been covering much recently in my philosophy class. In truth, can we be anything without something else? Every thing, person, shape, needs it opposite, its negative space, in order to exist. You are exactly right. That is why we need true friends. They are that objectivity if you cannot call upon it yourself. Well said, Vir. Well said.
What you say reminds me of a friend of mine’s post about confidence and trust as well as what Clive Barker wrote in his novella, The Hellbound Heart.
“The seasons long for each other, like men and women, in order that they may be cured of their excesses.
Spring, if it lingers more than a week beyond its span, starts to hunger for summer to end the days of perpetual promise. Summer in its turn soon begins to sweat for something to quench its heat, and the mellowest of autumns will tire of gentility at last, and ache for a quick sharp frost to kill its fruitlessness.
Even winter–the hardest season, the most implacable–dreams, as February creeps on, of the flame that will presently melt it away. Everything tires with time, and starts to seek some opposition, save it from itself” (31-32).
Well said! I’ve heard that cold causes that also! Objectivity, I agree, could save one from insanity.
Marianne, you are a fantastic commenter. Indeed, objectivity is an all important tool saving us from our own personalities, which, in the context of society, may seem insane.
n this scenario, a well adjusted man’s perseverance has a short life span, with the all too possible outcome of quickly turning from cute to serious to restraining order
Smells like a dark comedy.
The successful employment of perseverance boils down to one finite principle: objectivity
And an amount of detachment and reminding oneself that timing is key. Right idea, right business plan, wrong decade. Right idea, right business plan, accommodating decade, wrong technological climate.
Right intentions, right methodology, wrong woman. Right intentions, right methodology, right woman, wrong time. Lather, rinse, repeat.