I have randomly read a good bit about persistence and grit lately.

The whole idea of not giving up….

3 things all came together at once and made me wonder about it.

1. I read The Dip (Amazon), By: Seth Godin
2. I started listening to the Unemployable podcast, with Brian Clark.
3. And I watched this video on writing, with The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates.

The Dip
In, The Dip, Seth Godin explores quitting. When should you quit? When should you stick with something? And how do you tell the difference between the two? The Dip, you see, is the period of intense competition, right before your competition drops out. Many things are not a dip – and Godin argues that we should quit these things. Because, if persistence and grit don’t pay off, aren’t we just wasting our time?

Unemployable
Next, is Brian Clark of Unemployable. If you don’t know who Brian Clark is, he is the founder of CopyBlogger. Copyblogger is now under the umbrella of Rainmaker Digital. Unemployable is a website/ newsletter/ podcast that explores the life of the digital/lifestyle entrepreneur. The tagline they use on their podcast is: “The show for people who can get a job, they just aren’t inclined to take one. And that’s putting it gently.” At the end of every show, Brian Clark ends with the same line of encouragement. He says: “Keep going!”

This hits home in a video I saw where Clark was interviewed by Michael Hyatt. Hyatt asked what Copyblogger did to promote their content. Clark responded that most of their promotion was done for them by their fans. “We really just send an email out,” he explained. But you know how he said they got to that point? By publishing great content every day for a decade! That’s persistence.

Ta-Nehisi Coates
Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates touches on persistence too. How does he say you succeed as a writer? Just stick with it. Stick with it because writing is hard. And because it’s hard – many will eventually give up. They go to business school, law school, or whatever, and they quit chasing the life of being a writer. On the other side of that, the competition drops off. And guess what you have? A decade of practicing your skill-set with fewer competitors!

I don’t care if you get flattened a thousand times. As long as you get up that thousand-and-first time, you win. As Hemingway said, “You can never tell the quality of a bullfighter until that bullfighter has been gored.”

-Jerry Weintraub, When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead (Amazon)

That is getting through The Dip.

That is persistence.

That is grit.

So I’ll again echo Brian Clark:

Keep going!

UPDATE: Three days later, Michael Hyatt posted this.