I just had to steal this 37 signal blog posting

How’s this for tenacity? John Dane is 58 years old and has been trying out for the Olympic sailing team for 40 years. He finally made it this year with his son-in-law, Austin Sperry.

Dane missed qualifying for the Olympics 4 separate times, each by a few minutes. He didn’t give up after each loss, he just improved his sailing skills. It would have been too easy to give up after losing one or two qualifying races. John Dane took the more difficult route and persevered.

This resonated with me on a variety of personal and professional levels, but the real talk here is to realize that if you want it bad enough … you can’t give up.

Find out what went wrong the last time, fix it, then go at it again.

PS: This is very different from trying the same thing over and over (that’s insanity, as defined by Albert Einstein)