We are all achievers in our own right. We all have wanted to achieve things in our lives and we all have.

List 5 things that you have achieved in the last 5 years: To give you an example let me list my five:

1. settled my daughter's education
2. settled some financial matters
3. have wonderful friendships
4. have a loving relationship
5. got through a health crisis at home

See.? It was easy... I didn't quite think so (when I wrote the question down) but it really was easy.

To be an achiever it seems, mainly depends on one thing: Persistence

It's as Oprah Winfrey said in her show the other day. it is not that diets don't work, it's just that we do not have the persistence to stick to them.if we did, they would ALL work!

That's so true.

What is also true is that Persistence is a word we all don't like, as one writer put it."it is not sexy enough". In fact it is quite a hateful word: it implies hard work and all things not nice. You have to work hard. you've got to try and try. no pain, no gain, plough ahead, toil away, keep on keeping on.in other words, besides being something you don't really want to do, persistence is largely ignored especially by the media as a really boring concept and therefore it is ignored as the cornerstone of almost every success story that we have every known..

The success behind Thomas Edison who said that success is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. He is the all time master of persistence. So is Albert Einstein who spent a decade founding his theory of relativity.

Another word (to a lesser extent) for persistence, one, we are all more tolerant of and even one that we all like, is the word "focus". We have to put our focus on an idea, an attitude for some time but that "some time" implies yet again persistence. We can all focus but for how long?

Successful people don't give up, and they work hard.

In Chicken Soup for the Writer's Soul we are told that persistence is the success story behind every writer. Gone with the Wind and Dr Seuss' first book were each rejected over 20 times before it was published. So was Pearl S Buck's book The Good Earth (rejected 14 times) before it went on to win the Pulitzer Prize.

Even good old Confucius said: Our greatest glory is in never falling but in rising every time we fall.

If we can focus for a long enough time on an idea, concept, thought or attitude we could have success sitting on our laps.

But how many of us know people who can only chatter on and on about the same thing over and over again and we become slightly annoyed at the only topic that they seem obsessed about and the next time round we have a social outing we carefully avoid that person.

It seems then, that to become persistent is to become boring to your circle of acquaintances. So how to become an achiever and not be boring?

That's easy.

Firstly, all achievers if they are obsessed by or focussed on a project in their lives, are full of enthusiasm and that rubs on to other people who then become interested. And this is good for the persistent achiever. For if you have a goal that you would like to achieve, then one of the first things to do in order to commit yourself to it, is to make it public. By making an intention public it is more likely that you will want to keep on at it.

Secondly, to be an achiever and therefore accommodate persistence into your life, one would have to balance our private thoughts with our public ones. We would have to become aware of people in our external environment as one with very short attention spans, as generally people who have little patience with obsessions. One, therefore, has to participate in society such that we become aware that society's needs are very different from our own personal needs for achievement.

Thirdly, each and every one of us, whilst we consider persistence a rather pesky word, have had it instilled by the authorities that ruled our lives at a young and tender age that perseverance is to be admired. We were told that hard work would pay, that if we want to get ahead, we would have to persist in what we want. So whether or not, society considers persistence boring or not, they secretly admire it from deep within. From deep within us we are conditioned to admire persistence.

Let us then persist this New Year with our resolutions. One never knows whether our resolutions will turn into an obsession or a focus or a perseverance of sorts. And then we can look within ourselves and be pleased or peeved and see without and see whether people around us are secretly pleased or peeved. Could be fun!

About the Author: Has a masters degrees in training and education and has keen interest in Alternative therapy. Interested in Eastern philosophies and is a teacher of Chikung. Is living in Portugal but born and bred in Singapore. Great believer in world peace and in the integrity and well being of the human being.

Source: www.isnare.com