I remember one valuable lesson when I was travelling in Nepal, four years ago in April, 2006. As I was walking in the mountain ranges outside of Kathmandu, Nepal, I noticed a Nepali lady using a medium sized rock to break another huge block of marble off the mountain. The Nepali lady was pounding the same spot like thousands of times. It took me six hours to climb the mountain to see the Buddhist Temple and on the way back, I noticed the same Nepali lady and nearly all the marble stone was separated from the mountain. Now if this lady had stop hitting the marble, it would not have broken off the mountain. This is common in Nepal, Nepali women breaking parts of marble rock off the mountain and then carrying the huge stones on their back so they can sell it to feed their families. But what I remember is it took hours of hitting with the smaller stone and the lady never gave up.
The problem though is that most people would give up at this stage. Just like the story I heard about a man that was looking for diamonds in the Venezuelan watercourse. The group had worked stooping, gathering peebles, wishing, and hoping for one sign of a diamond. Their clothes were torn, old and their hats broken. They had not seriously thought of quitting until Solano said, "I'm through!" Together they had picked up 999,999 peebles of stone. One of the other workers said, "Pick up another and make it a million."
"All right," Solano said, and he bent down, put his hand on a pile of pebbles and pulled one out. It was the size of a chicken's egg. "Here it is," he said, "the last one." But it was heavy. He looked, and shouted, "it's a diamond." Harry Winston, a diamond dealer, paid Solano $200,000 for that millionth peeble. He must have felt a happiness that went beyond the money aspect of the diamond. But imagine if he had not put his hand inside the water for the millionth peeble, he would have quit too soon.
Elihu Root once said something very profound, "Men and women don't fail, they give up trying." Often it is the wrong start but the wrong stop that makes the difference between success and failure. To quit while you are ahead would be stupid, to quit when we're behind is even more stupid. It requires will to hold on a little longer. It requires tact to know that the measure of success is not the LUCK, the breaks of the game, but the conquest of failure.
The problem is that most of us is that we stop trying in trying times. So don't quit too soon.
by Thalia Bhandari
http://www.thinkandbeinspired.com
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