Today’s video is about how unshakeable determination is required for quitting drinking alcohol, quitting smoking or basically achieving anything that you want to achieve in your life.
You have to have determination in order to achieve the result and in order for you to get there. Otherwise, you are either not going to get there or it will be rubbish when you do get there and not the thing that you thought it would be.
I think one of the greatest analogies for persistence is the persistence of water and how water can erode.
There is no greater monument to that then the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is 450 kilometres long, 29 kilometres wide; at its widest point and 1.8 kilometres deep; at its deepest point.
All that is due to the Colorado River and it’s unbreakable, unshakeable persistence over millions of years.
The depth of 1.8 km is caused by erosion taking place over a couple of million years or however long it is that it has been doing it for. It has taken a couple of billion years for all those layers of rock and soil to be laid down and a couple of million years of persistence to uncover and to dig down into that depth.
In my personal opinion, there can be no more of a monument on this planet to persistence than that. I have never been to the Grand Canyon and it’s something I would love to see. I always remember the nutcase, Evil Knievel attempting to jump it.
I’ve a quote here to share by Calvin Coolidge who said
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent, will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.
The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race. The definition of persistence in the Merriam Webster Dictionary is – the fact of continuing in the opinion or course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.
For me, persistence is the divining thread that runs through all successes in life; successful people and achievements, whether it be somebody putting a man on the moon or the advance of medicine and science.
The advance of knowledge in general is through the persistence of individual men and woman throughout the ages. Edison once said that it took him ten thousand attempts before he found the one attempt to invent the lightbulb. Colonel Sanders of Kentucky Fried Chicken offered his recipe up – I think 1006 times, before someone said yes, and took it off him on the 1007th time and that was late in his life as well, so that’s a monument in itself to persistence.
Anyone who has ever stopped taking alcohol or any drug, whether it’s alcohol, nicotine, heroin, angel dust, cocaine or some other drug; anyone who has stopped any bad habit has done so through unswerving persistence.
And that’s basically what you have to do if you want to quit this drug. If you want to get away from this drug and the life that your drinking and drugging behaviour has brought around for you, you’ve got to have that unshakeable persistence – there’s really no other way of doing this. S how do you do it?
I will do a future Video with some tips on persistence and how to keep it in your life and tips on pursuing the things that you need to pursue with that unshakeable persistence, but for now the first thing that you need to know is the thing that I think is the ultimate tool that you can ever have in this fight.
You need to have a reason why you want to stop and to understand why you want to stop, whether that’s for health or family reasons, job, relationships or whatever the reasons is for you.
Your one priority is to figure out what you want to do and the specific reason why you want to quit. Saying to yourself, “I’m doing it for my health” is not good enough. You have to say – “Well drinking alcohol has caused X, Y and Z to happen in my life and this is why I’m doing it.”
My personal reason to quit drinking was because I didn’t want to be a bad influence on my Son, because every time I drank in front of him I was encouraging him to drink. To me that is just as bad as an heroin addict shooting up in front of their Children.
That image might be a lot stranger and further away from our realistic view on life, but when you take the two things side by side; the Guy that’s drinking and the Guy who is shooting heroin, the only thing that separates them is the needle.
Not many Parents would shoot up heroin in front of their Children if they were using heroin but how many Parents drink in front of their Children?
I didn’t stop drinking until my Son was in his twenties and that will always be to my own personal shame but there is nothing I can do about that now. All I can do is try and do my best to be a role model to push him towards stopping drinking and living a good life and to get rid of all the bullshit that our culture forces unto our Children now, generation after generation.
So, you have to understand your reason why first and foremost and then you have to make a plan.
How are you going to do this?
Where are, you going to go?
What do you want to achieve?
Once you know where you want to go and you have that final destination in mind, then you can make your plan and plan it out with as much detail as you can.
Figure out where you want to go and how you’re going to get there and break it down into manageable steps and finally, take action.
You have to do; you can’t just think, you can’t just write, you’ve got to do. You’ve got to take action and you’ve got to review your plans and actions regularly so that you know you are still going in the right direction.
At the start you are not going to know where you are going, not really. You may have a general idea of where you’re going and where your plan is going to take you but the future has a way of throwing up something completely different.
I am four years into this and four years ago I wouldn’t have had a clue of where I find myself today. I’m in the same general area, I’ve lived in this place and walked in these hills for the past five years. If you had asked me four years ago if I thought I would still be here, I probably would have said yes and I would have been right, but I might not have been. I might have moved somewhere else.
If you had told me that I was going to be thinking this way, having these types of thoughts and that I would be starting and doing a degree, I would have said that that was not going to happen.
So, have your plan, adjust along the way and you will keep moving forwards, onwards and upwards. Stay safe, good luck to you.
“Ambition is the path to success. Perseverance is the vehicle you arrive in” – Bill Bradley
Until next time…
Onwards and Upwards!
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