Abraham Lincoln lost almost everything you can lose in public life. Two business failures. A nervous breakdown. A fiancee who died. Eight elections he didn't win. Thirty straight years of the kind of public defeat that would make most of us close our laptops and never reopen them. Then in 1860, he was elected President of the United States.
I think about Lincoln a lot in October. October is the month when most of the people who started something in January have quietly stopped working on it. The launch energy is long gone. The applause from your friends has moved on to whatever else is in the news. You are alone with the work, and the work is harder than you thought it would be in February. October is when perseverance stops being a poster on a wall and becomes the only thing standing between you and quitting.
And here is what twenty-seven years of running my agency has taught me about that word.
The names you know
Jim Carrey was homeless before he was famous, living out of a van. Stephen King had his first novel rejected over thirty times. He has now sold more than 350 million books. Thomas Edison ran a thousand failed experiments before the lightbulb worked. J.K. Rowling typed Harry Potter on a typewriter, by hand, twelve separate times, because she could not afford to make photocopies.
The names you know all have the same shape of story. The shape is not "they were special." It is not "they got lucky." It is not even "they were more talented than the people you have never heard of." The shape is one word. Perseverance. They kept showing up after the moment when everyone in their life would have agreed it was reasonable to stop.
That is the whole game. The winners are often unremarkable at the start. They weren't the smartest, the most charismatic, or the most prepared. They were still standing on the third Tuesday of October in year five, when the original co-founder had quit, when the best client had left, when the bank account was an embarrassment. They didn't quit. That's the differentiator.
What perseverance actually is
I want to be careful here, because perseverance gets romanticized in a way that turns it into nonsense. It is not white-knuckle willpower. It is not "I will work harder than everyone else." It is not the hustle-bro version where you are proud of how little you slept.
Perseverance is a mindset that becomes a set of actions. It is the steady decision to look at a failure and ask, "what is this teaching me?" instead of, "what does this say about me?" Lincoln wrote a letter once, to a young lawyer named William Herndon, and one line in it has stayed with me for years. He wrote, "you cannot fail in any laudable object, unless you allow your mind to be improperly directed."
Read that twice. He is not saying you cannot fail. He is saying you cannot fail at the long arc of doing something worthy unless you let your own mind take you out of the game. The mind is the front line. The action is downstream of the mind. Perseverance starts with where you point your attention after the loss.
There was a year in our agency where we hit our best January ever, then watched sales decline four months in a row. I had two options. Read the chart as a verdict on me. Or read it as data about a system that needed adjusting. I chose the second one, eventually. Not gracefully. I rebuilt our sales rhythm. I stopped letting the production side dictate the pace of the sales side. The next year was better. Not because I willed it. Because I let the failure teach me.
Failure is a statement of the past. Perseverance is a hope for the future. If your mind is parked in the past, you cannot persevere into the future. It is that simple, and it is that hard.
action
1. Name the one thing you are on the verge of quitting this month. 2. Ask: is the failure I am looking at a verdict on me, or data about a system I can adjust? 3. If verdict, argue with it. You are almost never as bad as the worst week tells you. 4. If data, make one adjustment this week. Not five. One. 5. Tell one person who actually knows you - the two-person conversation is the hidden engine.
I will be back next Monday. So will the work. So will October. The only question is who you will be when November shows up.
