Finish The Job! [SFI-2]

You sometimes hear someone say, “don’t be a quitter!” But sometimes it’s right to quit. If you discover what you are doing is wrong, then you better quit immediately. If you discover you keep repeating the same steps, getting the same result, but expecting a different one—quit immediately! What you are doing is insanity.

If you’ve started out on a venture that is a continuous loss, with no clear evidence of ever being a success, and the only reason you do not quit investing your time and money in the loosing enterprise is because you’ve already invested so much time and money in it—quit immediately! You are just throwing good time and money after bad. It can only get worse.

These are exceptions, however, and most failures are the result of not finishing the job, of letting some difficulty or discouragement prevent you from doing all you are able to do to succeed.

There Are No Guarantees

To do less than your best at anything is alway morally wrong, but even if you do the moral thing, and make every possible effort you are capable of, there is no guarantee you will succeed. There is nothing immoral or disgraceful about failing, it is only immoral to do less than your best to keep from failing.

If you do not do your best, failure is almost assured, but if you do your best, and fail, that failure is only temporary. There are an infinite number opportunities in this world.

Edison’s Example

Thomas A. Edison was an extremely successful inventor, and if all you knew about Edison were his successful inventions, you might think he never knew what failure was, or perhaps his success was because he was a creative genius.

The, “God of Reality,” loves and rewards persistence. Whether or not Edison had any particular genius, even if had, that ability alone would never have made him a success. What made him a success was his dogged persistence and refusal to ever give up—he always finished the job.

Many of Edison’s patented inventions were not financial successes at all, and even those inventions that were a success required endless hours of trials and work before they succeeded. The most famous of those, of course, was the electric light, for which Edison literally tried thousands of possible filaments before finding one that worked.

In spite of the fact that most of the things he tried did not work, he never considered them failures. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work,” he said.

If he had quit after 9,999th trial, if he hadn’t finished the job, then he would have failed. As he said, “many of life’s failures are experienced by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

Perhaps Edison was a genius, but he explained his genius this way:

“Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” What a wonderful quaint old-fashioned idea, that success is the result of persistent hard work.

It is an old-fashioned idea, and a quaint one, too, these days, when everyone expects life to be easy and to have success handed to them on a platter. But the old-fashioned idea of success is the true one, and there are no short cuts to success.

If you are to succeed in this world, it is going to take hard work, and not giving up no matter how difficult it is, how discouraged you become, or impatient you are, and you must do the job to the best of your ability, and do it to the end. If you have done your best and do not succeed, it is not failure, you’ve just found one thing you cannot do. Try another, and do your best at that. If you are persistent, you will succeed, but you will have to finish the job.

Amen!