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Don't Quit Too Soon!
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Wendyl K. Leslie
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Serve To Lead Leadership Concepts
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"Don't Quit Too Soon!"
by Wendyl K. Leslie
Some years back, Newsweek magazine ran a full-page ad that
I thought was very good. The headline of the ad read,
"Before You Quit, Read This," and the body of the ad went
on to report:
"The first strategy of many who are faced with a problem is
to quit. But a man who suffered such severe burns on his
legs that he faced amputation--he didn't quit. Glenn
Cunningham became the most successful distance runner of
his time.
"And a man with less than one year of formal education
didn't quit. Abraham Lincoln became the most revered
president we ever had.
"And a fragile boy in Scotland, bedridden most of his
childhood, didn't quit. Robert Louis Stevenson became such
a masterful storyteller, your great grandchildren will
cherish his books as you did.
"Now, if you had all three of those strikes against you,
nobody would blame you for quitting. But unless your legs
are severely burned, and you're so fragile, you have to
stay in bed, and you never graduated from second grade,
why don't you turn around and get back to work. Maybe
we'll be writing about YOU someday!"
The story of successful people, wherever they may be found
--running a home, achieving business success or success in
any kind of endeavor--is the story of people who wouldn't
quit.
It makes you wonder how many people have stopped just short
of winning everything they could possibly want--maybe just
inches, just one day short of victory.
For us to be successful at anything, there is a series of
qualifications we must fulfill. It's as though we're being
tested to see whether or not we deserve the success we seek.
As we run up against one problem after another, we are
given the choice of quitting or pushing on to the next. And
if we keep going, if we never lose sight of what it is
we're working toward, eventually we'll make it.
Huxley, in an essay, compared it to a kind of game. He
wrote:
"To those who play well, the highest stakes are paid, with
the kind of overflowing generosity with which the strong
delight in strength. And those who play ill . . . are
checkmated . . . without haste, but without remorse."
And that seems to be the way it works. If a person will
stay with it--keep everlastingly at it--he will get a kind of
second wind. From somewhere he'll find the strength and
determination he needs to go on.
Every day of the week, there must be thousands who turn
away in defeat, and who will never know the great joys of
accomplishment and success, because they quit too soon. Who
can say how close they may have come? Maybe one more day,
or even an hour, could have meant the difference. They can
be compared to a youngster in school who quits a week
before graduation. They'll never know the abundance that
could have been theirs if they'd stayed with it a little
longer.
It's been wisely written that success in life is a matter
not so much of talent or opportunity as of concentration
and perseverance. And that is it's essence.
-----------------------
Wendyl Leslie, is editor of Serve to Lead Leadership Concepts,
and author of "Serve To Lead: Mastering the Leadership Style
of Jesus." Nominated for Marquis "Who's Who of America" for
2003, he invites you to visit the largest Christian Leadership
site on the Internet at: http://www.servetolead.net
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