Never Ever Quit…

Are you so fed up that you want to quit what you are doing? Are you doing everything you know how to and things aren’t working out as you thought they would and you are about to throw in the towel?

If you are in this situation, I want you to be encouraged and know that you are not alone. I'd like you to realize that before you perfect any craft you will need to spend 10,000 hours on it. Have you done that? If you haven’t already, you haven’t even perfected the craft yet. For example, the critical difference between expert musicians differing in the level of attained solo performance concerned the amounts of time they had spent in solitary practice during their music development, which totaled around 10,000 hours by age 20 for the best experts, around 5,000 hours for the least accomplished expert musicians and only 2,000 hours for serious amateur pianists. More generally, the accumulated amount of deliberate practice is closely related to the attained level of performance of many types of experts, such as musicians. You can read more about this in a paper titled Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice

Also, the two stories below of final success after many trials will encourage you.

Formula 409

The original formula of the cleaning solution, Formula 409, is so named because it took the inventors, Morris D. Rouff, who was a partner in Gem Products, a Detroit, Michigan company, which manufactured industrial cleaning supplies and his brothers Samuel and Nathan 409 tries to get the formula right.

The Electric Bulb 

About 22 people, most notably Sir Joseph Swan, had tried to invent an incandescent lamp/electric light using an incandescent filament, or wire, enclosed in a glass bulb, but had not been able to create a filament that could withstand intense heat over long enough periods of time to be practical. Even Edison had a tough time of it, going through a long, trial-and-error process in which he tested thousands of materials. Undaunted by failures, Edison finally found that a scorched cotton thread would work best. When heated in a vacuum, it produced a white glow without melting, evaporating, or breaking.

Although Swan came up with a similar light bulb around the same time, Edison patented his idea more aggressively, promoted his product more effectively, and sketched out a practical system of power supply which could support its use on a large scale. On New Year's Eve of 1879, Edison gave a public demonstration of the new bulb, lighting up his laboratory and a half mile of streets in Menlo Park before of thousands of spectators. Edison had not only invented an economical light source, but developed an entire system for generating and distributing electricity from a central power station.

The story goes that "Thomas Edison failed more than 1,000 times when trying to create the light bulb". (The story is often told as 5,000 or 10,000 times depending on the version.) When asked about it, Edison allegedly said, "I have not failed 1,000 times. I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb."

So as you can see, you have not and are not failing. You are slowly but steadily climbing the learning curve and discovering ways of not doing what you do.

So stay strong and keep on keeping on.

I wish you much success in all your endeavors.