#Mywordfortoday is building your #perseverance Muscle.

Over the last few days, i joined a #dailywritingchallenge,, so i thought i'd post what i had written in the last couple of days. 

So here's one:

#Mywordfortoday is building your #perseverance   muscle.

A few weeks, I wrote about the mechanics of being average, read here https://bit.ly/3eWJxrU.

This article sought to show that a natural curse of talented or brilliant people is that many times, they tend to underperform or perform at sub-par levels inconsistent with their natural or actual abilities.

This is probably because brilliant people are blessed with an innate ability to grasp concepts quickly. And so, they tend to leave stuff to the last minute and it piles up, leading to an overload of sorts.

Could we link the foregoing, I am going to call it a disability😄 to a lack of perseverance?

I listened to a tedtalk by Angela Lee Duckworth where she, in the course of her research found that talent or brilliance is never enough.

If you will not persevere with your passion, you will continue to operate at sub-optimal levels.

From my viewpoint, grit or perseverance isn't just about having the courage or resolve to stay in situations others found intolerable (this is certainly a part of it), it is having the resolve to make of your circumstances the best that you can and be successful at doing this.

An illustration will best enunciate my point. In Nigeria, my country, we find people stuck in careers basically because they feel they do not have place else to go.

The result is the inability to do the job they chose to stay in and frustration with the "hands that life has thrown at them".

This is why mere resolve to stay put in a place is in my view not persevering.

Perseverance is determining to make the best use of the circumstances you are in, taking absolute control of what which is in your control and making a success of it.

I should point out that even when you enjoy what you do, challenges will arise, life loves to "set leg" for one( this is Nigeria-speak for obstacles in one's path)and the only way to excel is to be tenacious.

Is there a way to develop your perseverance muscle? Is there any science we can turn to for help?

According to Ms. Duckworth, one of the ways to build your grittiness is to develop a growth mindset which is essentially learning that growth is not fixed, the ability to grow grows with effort.

So learning to persevere might simply be as little as putting in more effort in reaching a goal. I had written about strength in one of my write-ups and said that for me, strength is the ability to carry on, even in the face of defeat.

To end this piece, I will go back to my opening, talent or brilliance is never enough If you will not be resilient or tenacious.

You must find a way to dip down inside you and push on, you will experience frustration, your motivation will ebb, you will make mistakes and you will fail, but you have got to keep at it.

And when you are tempted to give up, remember Darwin was considered by his father to be a very ordinary boy possessing a "rather low intellect".

Success is not as a function of your brilliance, it is more of your ability to persevere, your grit, your passion, your resilience.

One of the ways to better build my writing is joining this #dailywritingchallenge in order to hone my skills and more importantly share my ideas, and perhaps change the mindset of a person who is reading this.

Bibire Omotoyosi Salihu🌹