Category: persistence

The nominees for induction into the National Toy Hall of Fame were just announced and I was astonished to learn of two of the potential candidates: Bingo and Yahtzee. I would have thought they would have been enshrined many years ago.

Bingo has been a standardized game since 1929 and is the object of organized fundraising events in almost every city. It has been a staple at county fairs, church festivals and nursing home activity rooms for generations. Yahtzee, too, has a long history dating back to its inception in the 1940s and its owner Hasbro still sells 50 million games each year.

Whether or not Bingo and/or Yahtzee are among the three lucky inductees this year, they provide a lesson of persistence to all of us: do what you do best and keep doing it, year after year, decade after decade, whether or not you receive any official recognition for it. These games have brought countless hours of enjoyment to many. We should all be so lucky to have that as our legacy.

Yesterday was a beautiful day and I wanted to enjoy the outside. The concert in the park was canceled. My favorite out-of-town store was closed on Sunday during the pandemic so I couldn’t take a leisurely drive there. The new restaurant I want to try wasn’t open. The ferry ride required reservations. It became comical that my whole series of initial thoughts were unavailable to me. I went from Plan A to Plan H before I settled on a picnic dinner.

I was reminded of other efforts that some of my clients undertake as they seek to make changes in their organization. They pursue one path and if that doesn’t work then they move on to another and then another. I think some of them are on Plan Q, not just Plan H. The important thing is that they keep going.

It’s easy to become stymied when the optimal path is blocked, but make your persistence into a game. As you continue to pursue other options, you’ll come to appreciate that you succeeded on Plan H instead of Plan Q and keep any future thwarting in perspective.

I recently enjoyed the Temple Grandin movie that chronicles the life of the film’s namesake, an autistic woman who grew up to become an international figure in autism – and cattle handling. (I wrote about the unusual pairing of careers in dot 2150).

What impressed me most was the number of barriers that Temple overcame before she achieved success. Think about it:

• She was autistic and often had difficulty reading social cues, causing her to be called a freak and be ridiculed since childhood.
• She was a woman attempting to forge a career in the ultra-macho male world of cattle handling.
• She was only a graduate student when she first published her revolutionary ideas on cattle handling, challenging ideas long held by those far more experienced than she.
• She was a trailblazer and innovator, and like others who have gone first, she was dismissed with skepticism and called crazy.

Any one of her challenges could have stopped a less hearty person from pursuing their dream, but Temple persisted in the face of all four simultaneously. She bought a pickup truck and covered it in mud to fit in and drive past security at the feed lot. She talked her way into getting a press pass to gain access to the cattle ranches. She got her idea published in a trade magazine to give it credibility to do her master’s thesis on the variations of moo-ing (technically called the “agitation of cattle”).

Temple’s mentor told her to visualize her transition from high school to college as being a door that opened up onto a whole new world. “All you have to do is decide to go through it,” he said. She used that metaphor to persevere and go through doors throughout her whole life, no matter how uncomfortable it was for her to do so. And because she kept walking through these doors, over half of the cattle in North America are now handled in humane systems that Temple Grandin designed.

What door do you need to walk through to make your impact? If an autistic, female, graduate student can revolutionize cattle handling, you can achieve your dreams, too.

The Gwyneth Paltrow movie Contagion is experiencing a revival but the movie of hers that more accurately sums up the COVID situation for me is Sliding Doors. In that film, the viewer sees two parallel stories – one when she catches the elevator and one where the doors slide shut before she can enter. In both scenarios, a mixture of good and bad occurs — confirming there wasn’t one perfect way for life to unfold.

I’ve thought about this movie a lot lately to help me keep perspective during the virus. I know it seems like everything that is happening is bad but there are seen and unseen benefits that will result. Things will be different than they would have been without COVID, but not necessarily worse. You may have averted being in an accident because you weren’t out on the road. On the trip you take next year instead of now, you may meet a lifelong friend. The job you didn’t get because of cancelations may free you up to create something that will result in more clients down the line. The time you spend with family now may solidify a bond that lasts a lifetime. You may have avoided getting into a damaging argument at work because the meeting where it occurred never happened. And on and on.

We’ll never know what twists our life’s path takes because of the virus – or because of any action or inaction we take every day. Instead, we need to take solace that it is what it is and make the best of the world that we find ourselves in at this moment.