Perseverance, industriousness

“You finish what you start. The industrious person takes on difficult projects and finishes them, ‘getting it out the door, with good cheer and minimal complaints. You do what you say you will do and sometimes more, never less.” (Source: VIA Institue)

Perseverance involves the voluntary continuation of a goal-directed action despite the presence of challenges, difficulties, and discouragement. There are two vectors of perseverance. It requires both effort for a task and duration to keep the task up. Learn more at Via Institute on Character

The Noel Strengths Academy defines it this way:

Persistent people are “finishers”
They push through obstacles
They are resilient and hopeful
To be persistent is to persevere and to be industriousness

Yes, strengths can be overused…or underused

Underuse: Fragility
Overuse: Obsessiveness

Key Research:

Rank order of Perseverance in populations from:
- US : 17;
- European: 20
- Asia: 16
- Latin America: 15
- Sub-Saharan Africa: 19
- Middle east: 16
Top 10 (rank order) strengths expressed at work: honesty, judgment, perspective, fairness, perseverance, love of learning, leadership, zest, curiosity, social intelligence.
In a workplace study involving 686 participants, the character strength of perseverance was the strength most associated with work productivity and least associated with counter-productive work behaviors. This was best explained by the workers’ sense of meaning at work and perceptions of work-as-a-career and as-a-calling (Littman-Ovadia & Lavy, 2016).
Character strengths of the mind (e.g., self-regulation, perseverance, love of learning) were predictive of school success (Weber & Ruch, 2012b).
Several character strengths (e.g., gratitude, curiosity, perseverance, meaning) were examined from an international community sample of 755 individuals to examine their predictive value in goal attainment and changes in well-being. Curiosity and perseverance predicted the strongest increase in goal attainment over time, but it was only curiosity that boosted the effects of goal attainment on life satisfaction two times across a 6-month period (Sheldon et al., 2015).
The character strengths most associated with the engagement route to happiness are zest, curiosity, hope, perseverance, and perspective (Peterson et al., 2007).
The character strengths – perseverance, love, gratitude, and hope – predict academic achievement in middle school students and college students (reported in Park & Peterson, 2009a).

– “Persistence” is the voluntary continuation of a goal-directed action in spite of obstacles, difficulties, or discouragement. Simply measuring how long someone works at a task does not adequately capture the essence of persistence, because continuing to perform something that is fun or rewarding does not require one to endure and overcome setbacks. In this character strength we can use the terms perseverance, industriousness and persistence interchangeably.

Ghandi had some thoughts:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

What Mark Twain has to add:

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did so. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Put into action the recommendations from the Authentic Happiness Coaching Newsletter on Persistence/Perseverance:

Finish a project ahead of time.
Notice your thoughts about stopping a task, and make a conscious effort to dismiss them. Focus on the task at hand.
Begin using a time management aid of some sort (a palm pilot, a daily planner, etc.). Find a system that works and actually use it.
Set a goal and create a plan for sticking to it.
When you wake up in the morning, make a list of things that you want to get done that day that could be put off until the next day. Make sure to get them done that day.

Tayyab Rashid and Afroze Anjum offer 340 Ways to Use VIA Character Strengths including these four for Persistence/Perseverance:

Set five small goals weekly. Break them into practical steps, accomplish them on time, and monitor your progress from week to week.
Select a role model who exemplifies perseverance and determine how you can follow her/his footsteps. If this person is alive and someone you know, speak with him or her about this strength.
Write your goals and aims and post them where they can inspire you regularly. Keep your list short enough that it doesnZt seem overwhelming
Attend a seminar or workshop on time management. Write the key ideas down and review them weekly.

3 Articles on How I Develop Grit

Ted Talk with Angela Duckworth on Grit

Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.

Measure your Grit at Angela’s site.

Carol Dweck researches “growth mindset” — the idea that we can grow our brain’s capacity to learn and to solve problems. In this talk, she describes two ways to think about a problem that’s slightly too hard for you to solve. Are you not smart enough to solve it … or have you just not solved it yet? A great introduction to this influential field.