Perseverance is the only key to success. The only pre-requisite. To give up, is the only guaranteed path to failure because the pursuit is not given another chance.
How much can this be applied to? Success in any matter, definitely. But possibly to meaning it’s self? It seems there may be ties to the idea of suffering.
This may be similar to Thinking in Bets as well. If decisions are just bets placed on possible futures, the only way to guarantee the future that does not hold what you desire, is to stop placing bets. One day you might just get lucky.
Quote
“The jars would have exploded like tiny bombs. Fish were vaporized. Unidentified creatures were incinerated, possibly never to be found again. Every last specimen was destroyed. And that wasn’t all. For years, David had been working on a secret document, a treasure map of sorts, revealing never-before-seen branches of the tree of life. A huge and chandeliering chart made up of frenetic lines declaring insight, declaring evolutionary connections—completely torched. The reporter charged with assessing the damage could barely contain his grief. “The flames of an hour had near undone his life work,” he writes in the Bloomington Telephone.” He did not linger on how much time he’d wasted; he did not consider the seeming futility of what he was trying to do—to make order in a world ruled by Chaos. He claimed to have learned only one lesson from the whole ordeal. What was it? To stay humble? To set more reasonable goals than, say, cataloging every freshwater fish of North America? “To publish at once,” he writes. Oh, to push harder.
Reference
Book: Why Fish Don’t Exist
Author: Lulu Miller
Location: 529-535