Persistence is the fuel that drives your will power to accomplishment through industrious hard work even when you feel like quitting..
What is meant is persistence of action.
If you continually think about something, without action, it’s wasted energy.

Your willingness to overcome obstacles preventing non-actions of laziness,  procrastination, and the temptations of less meaningful immediate gratification will be the test of your persistence.  Your ability to persevere and circumvent self-doubt along with the several incarnations of fear, is a good measure of this.

Perseverance is the endurance that wins the battle.
As when running a marathon, persistence in action will also start providing it’s own motivation.  When you accomplish the smaller tasks of making it to the next check point, you will have more reason to continue to the end knowing you have made it that far already.

When strive to complete any meaningful goal, such as running a marathon, you motivation will come and go like spectators along the path.  Sometimes you can get encouragement from those around you and sometimes you are left to your own devices to make it through.  But it’s not your motivation that gets you to the finish line, that only got you to start the race.  It’s your persistence of action that carries you to the end.

But persistence is not stubbornness.  If you fall and break your leg, it would be silly to continue running to the end.  You do need to update and revise you goals as required.

When I younger I had a goal of making money with real estate and at the age of 22 bought my first house before I ever owned a car.  I just couldn’t understand the point of throwing away my money on rent.  Since then I have acquired additional properties and rented them out.  But that was some time ago and my interest in Real Estate is no longer an inspiration.  Sure, I still own the houses as they are a good investment that provide a small steady income, but I’ve become much more interested in providing assistance to help people help themselves. So I’ve all but abandoned previous goals in that field and the closest thing I do with houses now work with real estate agents to improve their business models and marketing efforts.

Years ago a friend of mine was on a road trip from Toronto Ontario to somewhere near Calgary Alberta, about a 20 hour straight drive.  Along the way they purchased a couple new tapes from a bulk bin to get them though the dead radio areas along the drive.   From this experience I had the following line of inspiration shared with me:

“To create, you must destroy”

You only have so much room in your life to make meaningful things happen.
If you encounter any sort of personal growth you will not be the same person you were last year, or last month even. To make room for your new aspirations, you have to learn how to abandon projects that only serve to slow down your progress.

This was particularly difficult for me.  I’ve always been an idea driven guy who has several projects on the go.  Adding to this, my mom is a pack rat, my Grandfather is pack rat, and I developed habits that caused my basement to be filled with 15 old printers I could re-purpose the internal motors and controls for, 12 microwaves because the power transformers inside them are expensive to buy but easy to find on the curve (that was for a home arc welder I never finished), and several other items.

The time came when I needed to make better progress. That progress didn’t happen until I threw away all the idea’s of projects I liked, but was never driven to complete.  This allowed me far better concentration to do things like write these articles for you with a much clearer head, and the time to do them effectively.

The value true of persistence is not found by clinging on to the past, but by maintaining a clear vision of your goals continually refining your path as you improve your ability to accomplish the values that drive you.

As you develop personally, your ability to clearly understand your mission will improve. This in turn allows for more effective actions to be pursued, forcing you to abandon ideas that you realize are not as well aligned as you first thought.