Are you Persevering or being Stubborn?

August 19, 2018
Aleksey Weyman

I was speaking with a friend sometime ago, who was meeting with me to get advice on how to improve his business. I won’t provide names, but his business revolved around creative talent management...

He wanted to chat with me because his clients were seeing stagnant returns and he couldn't understand why he was unable to increase profitability.

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He told me he had tried everything which, if you've heard any of my seminars (available here), that in itself is a wrong assumption to make.

He went on to tell me how relentlessly he's been grinding and pushing his campaigns, often times losing sleep and skipping meals just to make sure that certain assets were delivered on time.

You might say that’s a lot of commitment, but I could tell right away what the issue was here. This man thought he was persevering, but he was in fact just being stubborn! Perseverance and stubbornness are NOT the same thing, and often times they get mixed up.

This man new his vision, he knew he needed to get profits up for his clients, but what he thought was perseverance, was just stubbornness preventing him from trying something new. Instead of approaching the situation from a new perspective, with a new model for earning profit, he continued to use the same principles that had worked in the past and was pushing them to perform at the level needed.

Well we all know that if a car has no more engine power behind it, it’s not going to go any faster no matter how hard you push the accelerator. Take a moment to reflect on your own life, and ask yourself: are you doing something today that used to work but is no longer reaping the same results?

The inventor of the first cellular telephone, Martin Cooper said it so well: obstacles in life can do one of two things:

1. they can make you quit.
2. they can reinforce your resolution.

This is so important to understand about success. When you come across an obstacle, are you simply trying to push through it using the “stubborn” approach, or are you finding a way to get around it while still pursuing the same goal- that’s perseverance!

So you may ask, how can I get beyond an obstacle in life if “stubborn” approaches are all that I know? My friends asked me this very question; what if I really only know this one way to earn a profit, am I doomed? I said, well that’s going to be up to you!

One thing we can all do when faced with obstacles that seem too great to overcome, is we must seek perspective. Perspective to see the obstacles in a new light, it could be from deep inside us, or from people around us, outside.

We must broaden the scope of our thinking and understand that there is always another way, always. He thought quietly and within a few moments had an epiphany! He said; “Well I guess there is a new medium that I’ve seen used a few times by other creators, but haven’t really looked into using it in my situation.”

Boom. He allowed perspective from outside of himself to pour in and filtered it inline with his goal. Within a few days, his clients assets were receiving hundreds of thousands of new impressions- this was based on an Instagram service he ran, for your knowledge.

So now I want to take this one step further and present you with a challenge. Ask yourself; what in your life might actually be contributing to your demise?

What old habits are you holding onto that, when confronted with an obstacle, you put them into practice and get less than optimal results? Ask yourself honestly, are you doing this out of fear? Fear that in order to overcome said obstacles you must let go of something?

Or it could be you have a system in place that has always provided a solution but, a newly presented obstacle is too great for the system to handle? Having perseverance means always taking steps towards your goal, but not being stubborn in which methods you use to reach it.

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