I read a lot of books, and some of them I obtain second-hand. So occasionally I end up with a copy that is full of handwritten notes and highlights.
Last week I opened a book by spiritual teacher Byron Katie. I quickly discovered that the previous owner had smothered it with notes. The pages were full of circled words, underlines, exclamation points, stars and hand-written reactions like “whoa!”.
Covered in notes…but only for 17 pages. Then the markings stopped. And the next 300 pages were untouched. The reader apparently gave up.
What happened? What made them stop reading a book that had clearly made an impression? And not only stop reading the book, but to give the book away!
There’s a lesson here about persistence.
It’s easy to run around chasing new ideas. Thinking that the next hot tip or technique will make everything better.
But quite often we don’t need more good ideas. We just need to stick with the ideas we’ve got long enough for them to work.
What are you working on at the moment? What if you committed to doing it a little bit every day for 30 days? Can you imagine how much more skilled you’d be at the end? Can you see what you’d be able to do?
It takes persistence to turn epiphanies into progress.
