Daily Gratitude: We talked some about persistence yesterday a bit it’s such an important subject. Napoleon Hill devotes entire chapters to it in all his works. For most of my life it was something I just “did” (being persistent) but without even realizing it or understanding what I was doing. However, this past spring I really found out what it meant. As I was training for Vol State, I was having a lot of trouble. There was no improvement. My pace stayed the same and it was horrible. No matter what I did, I didn’t seem to get past a certain point where my legs would just feel empty too. And hills-oh my, there was no change there either. What was I going to do? What i wanted to do was quit and just go back to easy walks of only a couple hours. But my desire to finish the entire 314 miles of Vol State drove me to keep going out. I added 4 days in a row of 8-9 hours per day for 3 weeks in a row. I will tell you that it was the hardest thing I had to do after the second one. That third series was full of self talk. And it wasn’t good self talk. My head was a cacophony of negative words and phrases. It was like plowing my way past an iron curtain of those thoughts. Swatting flies was easier. But fear of not finishing kept me going out even without evidence of results. Well, turns out there was improvement but it took being in the race and covering the miles to find that out. That resistance (all the bad talk and thoughts) was just being resistance- that’s just what it does. I had to be persistent without even seeing that it was doing any good. Same thing when I kept applying to medical school. Resistance kept pushing me back and I kept coming on submitting another application. You have to just keep pushing against it. And you’ll win eventually!