Although this quote is widely attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, he credits it, in his Autobiography, Chapter IX, to Squire Bill Widener of Widener’s Valley, Virginia.Working to achieve something is hard.Battling adversity as we work on a project, or just in day-to-day life is even harder. Progress demands seeing beyond the frustrations and fears that strike on a daily basis.Staying the course requires that we put aside frustrations over results and improvements that come infrequently and on a smaller scale than might be desirable.Stop letting blind people tell you what you see. Successful people aren’t always exceptionally talented. Sometimes they’re just exceptionally tough.
The road to personal success needn’t be difficult: it just takes one step. No matter who you are, where you are in life, and what your experience amounts to, you always have enough inside of you to take that first step. Arthur Ashe, the first black tennis player selected to the United States Davis Cup team and the only one ever to win the singles title at Wimbledon, the US Open, or the Australian Open, accomplished a lot despite growing up in extremely racially tense times.
And even after his career as a tennis player ended, he took his experience and wrote and commentated for major news outlets, was active in helping young tennis players, wrote a book, and threw himself into civil rights endeavors.
By working with what you have, you accumulate more experience and explore your expertise, and by the end, you’ll be able to do much more than you had originally thought possible.