The value of persistence

What I enjoy most about living is that I keep on learning things and it seems that the most I study a situation or labor at finding a solution to a problem, most of the times things suddenly clear up and I overcome a momentary difficulty and often, in so doing, I also acquire new knowledge. Yet, I have often been tempted to give up when faced with problems that appear to difficult to solve or when the time it takes to address them doesn't seem available or worth my while. I have also at time given up just out of sheer laziness and impatience. So when we focus on it, persistence might be, for some of us, just a mental game that keeps us going and that we enjoy because we hate to lose, or we can't accept to see ourselves capitulating when we're overwhelmed with something we've never handled or conquered before. It must have something to do with a competitive mind, a survival instinct and a desire to always better ourselves and our environment.

There's also an add-on element that we can ignore. The more time we spend on a given endeavor, the greater the investment we have in it and the more difficult it becomes to let go of it; it simply becomes invaluable. When we've poured so much or our energies into something, the challenge somehow becomes a personal property that we no longer can break-away from. This naturally leads me to the extreme value of that wonderful quality, that if left uncontrolled will lead to stubbornness, the land of much diminished returns and the path to bankrupting the precious gains made on the way up, but of course, we know better than that and won't even get there...