Patience, endurance, resilience, stick-to-it-iveness, these are all common buzz words at this time of year when our enthusiasm for our new year’s resolutions begins to waiver. The Colonel said, “Keep on keeping on, kid. Significance doesn’t grow out of one attempt. Significance comes from pushing through countless failed attempts and still keeping at it. That’s the only way you learn. That’s the only way you grow.”
Long before Dad took charge of the Flight Dynamics Lab, he was playing with airplanes. When I was young, Dad spent countless hours and a ton of his own money building remote control airplanes. The very first of which had a six-foot wingspan, took him a year and a half to build, and flew off into the horizon on her maiden flight, never to be seen again.
Although Mom never let Dad forget the first, lost “toy,” the lessons we learned from that costly mistake were invaluable. We learned that the very things we don’t anticipate are the ones that will go wrong. We learned to always have a backup plan. We learned to expect the unexpected – and Dad learned to never again tell Mom how much he had spent on his many and varied projects! But Dad kept keeping on and learning from his mistakes.
Dad’s initial R.C. plane debacle did not keep him from building a second and many more after that. He kept at it, always looking for ways to improve the design. With each new model, he would adapt the wing structure or sculpt his own airfoils. He tried hundreds of different materials and combinations. Some worked well, some didn’t, but each iteration taught him things he would then put into play years later when he became Division Chief of the Air Force Flight Dynamics Laboratory. In that environment, Dad’s tenacity manifested as he and his team designed new materials and structures that changed our understanding of aero and flight dynamics, and engineered aircraft that are still in the air today.
So, what are you thinking of giving up on that maybe just a little tenacity would allow you to push through to a breakthrough? Keep on keeping on. Significance doesn’t grow out of one attempt. Significance comes from pushing through countless failed attempts and still keeping at it.
Read Lauren’s Whitepaper on The Nine Essentials of Significant Leadership.