Most people who have achieved remarkable success in life did not do so out of pure luck. More often than not, we’ll find out that things did not even go their way at the beginning.
We all have different ways of coping with challenges, but dealing with adversity puts most of us in a place of struggle. There are many roads to success and there’s no one right formula that guarantees it for everyone. But, for those that do make their dreams come true, a common denominator is that passion and perseverance together play a huge role in creating that success.
Whenever passion surfaces along with perseverance, it often ends up becoming a success story in one way or another. They simply work hand in hand to create success.
Passion will not sustain itself, meanwhile, perseverance without passion (or having one’s heart in the right place) could be pure drudgery, which likely never leads to real success as well. But together they make a potent combination for achieving goals and beating difficult moments.
If You Have a Goal, You Need to Be Passionate
Setting goals starts with us defining what we want. There are many paths to success, but the key is in finding out what you want to achieve in life. More often than not, passion has a lot to do with the individual; where we came from, how we experienced life, our traumas and breakthroughs all play a role in defining our interests and choices. The things that we want to spend our time and energies on for the rest of our days define our passions.
Some people argue that they don’t know what their passion is, or that they might have too many to pursue just one. Ultimately, our actions truly define us. The things we choose to do consistently speak up as our choices in life.
But more importantly, if we’ve set some goals to achieve, then we must go at it with passion. We must want it enough to put our energies and efforts into working towards that goal. Our goals won’t materialize by themselves without us making the efforts to do so. Passion gives us a sense of clarity and meaning and helps us to understand what we want to do in life.
Perseverance is Key to Sustaining Our Passions
Passion gives us motivation and energy. However, passion alone will not suffice. Eventually, challenges will come our way to try to stop us from achieving our goals.
Without a strong will to persevere, we might eventually stop doing the things we love and give up on our dreams because times eventually seem too hard. But that is just how life is meant to be. It will test our will and capacity most of the time before things become easier and better.
That is how most successes are created. Signing up for our goals means experiencing some failures, but ultimately forging on. Failures are a part of the package and perseverance will keep us going in spite of them. No one ever became successful without learning from their own experiences and set of failures. They’ve simply gotten stronger from experiencing and overcoming these hurdles.
If we have perseverance, we stand a better chance of winning against various odds. Although we can consider taking a pause every now and then, perseverance makes it unlikely that you will quit something that you know is worthwhile.
Perseverance must exist together with passion, to make dreams and goals a reality.
Grit is Passion and Perseverance for Long-term Goals
Angela Duckworth, an American psychologist and popular author and speaker on the subject matter defines grit as “passion and sustained persistence applied toward long-term achievement, with no particular concern for rewards or recognition along the way.”
It’s easy to see how having grit is key to success for anyone. People who have both passion and perseverance, and who apply them towards long-term goals, eventually become successful in the goals they set out to achieve. It’s almost an inevitable result when applying these two qualities, but success also rarely happens overnight.
Passion and perseverance combined, as well as applied consistently, will pave the way for people to succeed more certainly. There is no one sure path to success, but grit, or passion and perseverance together, make it definitely more likely.
