Perseverance

Definition

VIA: Perseverance is the commitment to overcome obstacles & pursue long-term goals, essential for achieving success.

Wikipedia: Continuing in a course of action without regard to discouragement, opposition or previous failure.

Cambridge Dictionary: Continued effort to do or achieve something, even when this is difficult or takes a long time.

Cambridge Dictionary: Continued effort to do or achieve something, even when it’s difficult or takes a long time.

Perseverance as a character strength or virtue relates to grit (passion and perseverance), persistence, and determination rather than “belief perseverance” (which refers to the psychological bias of holding onto beliefs even when presented with evidence that contradicts them).  The facets of perseverance can be elaborated:

• Grit combines both the passion for a goal and unwaving determination to see it through even when facing significant challenges and setbacks.
• Persistence and determination is the ability to continue focus on an activity or pursuit of a goal despite difficulties or opposition.
• Endurance emphasises the ability to sustain effort over a prolognged period despite pain or other forms of adversity.
• Tenacity is an unusualy strong and persistent effort despite difficulty or resistance.

The above all involve a commitment to continue striving towards a goal, but they emphasize different aspects of the process.  In particular grit is highly correlated with achievement (in many cases more-so than other factors such as natural talent or socio economic advantages)

Examples

Thomas Edison tested thousands of filament materials before landing on one that worked for the light bulb. He famously reframed every failed attempt as data, not defeat — he’d “found thousands of ways that wouldn’t work.”

J.K. Rowling had the first Harry Potter manuscript rejected by multiple publishers before Bloomsbury took a chance on it. She kept submitting it because she believed in the story, even when nobody else did yet.

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison for his opposition to apartheid without abandoning his commitment to justice and equality, eventually becoming South Africa’s first Black president.

Diana Nyad attempted an unassisted 110-mile swim from Cuba to Florida four times across three decades before finally completing it at age 64 — swimming through jellyfish stings, hallucinations, and exhaustion on her fifth attempt.

Malala Yousafzai continued campaigning for girls’ education even after being shot by the Taliban for doing exactly that, going on to become the youngest-ever Nobel Prize laureate.

Gertrude Ederle quit during her first attempt to swim the English Channel, then came back to complete it — at 19, and two hours faster than any man had before her.

Suggested Track

Develop a checklist of activities from the examples below or beyond. At regular intervals discuss the activities and explore how they fostered curiosity. Finish the track with one or more of the challenges.

A perseverance-focused track works best when it gives a young person an actual long goal to chase, rather than just talking about the idea in the abstract. One approach is a single sustained project — training for a fun run, learning an instrument, writing something long-form — tracked over 8 to 12 weeks, with regular built-in checkpoints to reflect on what’s getting harder and why.

Literature, Art and Media

Books:

• Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Duckworth — the foundational book on why sustained effort tends to outperform raw talent, full of real case studies from spelling bee finalists to West Point cadets.
• I Am Malala, Malala Yousafzai — a firsthand account of standing by a belief in education for girls even under direct threat.
• Long Way Gone (or similar YA memoirs of resilience) — accounts of teenagers navigating extreme adversity that show perseverance isn’t abstract, it’s lived day by day.
• The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins — a YA fiction staple where the protagonist’s persistence under pressure is central to the plot, not just a subplot.

Visual Art:

• Washington Crossing the Delaware, Emanuel Leutze — depicts General Washington and his troops pushing across an icy river against brutal conditions, a classic visual symbol of persisting through hardship for a larger goal.

Podcasts:

• No Barriers, hosted by Erik Weihenmayer (the first blind climber to summit Everest) — interviews with people who’ve defied major obstacles, useful for hearing persistence described in someone’s own words rather than a highlight reel.

TED Lectures:

• Grit: The power of passion and perseverance — Angela Lee Duckworth. The talk that popularised “grit” as a predictor of success, based on her time teaching in a public school classroom.
• Never, ever give up — Diana Nyad. A firsthand account of the fifth attempt that finally succeeded, and what it took to keep going when the first four didn’t.
• How to Have True Grit — Zachary Bernier-Michaud. A younger speaker’s take on what grit looks like day-to-day, aimed more directly at a teen audience.
• GRIT: The Role of Perseverance in Success — Tricia Yap. A former MMA fighter’s account of recovery and rebuilding after being knocked down, literally and otherwise.

Movies:

• Rudy: 1993 Movie about the true story of Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger” doggedly chasing a dream.
• The Pursuit of Happyness (2006) — a father’s months-long struggle through homelessness while chasing a stockbroker internship, built on sheer refusal to quit.
• Hidden Figures (2016) — three Black women mathematicians persisting against both racism and sexism to help put astronauts into orbit.
• Rocky (1976) — less about winning the fight and more about proving to yourself you can go the distance.
• Million Dollar Baby (2004) — an older, mature look at what it costs to persist toward a dream most people think is out of reach.

Mentors

To be completed by program coordinator.

Events

Check adventure / endurance racing calendars such as Ahotu or the Running Calendar.

Places

El Camino de Santiago (Spain) — a centuries-old pilgrimage route that can stretch from a few days to over a month on foot. What makes it a perseverance landmark isn’t the scenery so much as the sheer repetition: walking through blisters, boredom, and bad weather, day after day, toward a destination that never gets closer quickly. 

Kokoda Track (Papua New Guinea) — for older teens ready for a serious physical and historical challenge, the real 96km trek across the Owen Stanley Range is one of the most demanding and meaningful long-distance walks connected to Australian history.

Bibbulmun Track (Western Australia) — a 1,000km walking trail from Kalamunda to Albany through forest and coastline. Most people who attempt the full track do it in sections over months or years, making it a good example of perseverance as a long project rather than a single push. 

Mundabidi Trail (Western Austarlia) – 1,067km off-road cycling route running from Mundaring to Albany in Western Australia. It features free public campsites, forest singletracks, and small country towns. You can plan your trip or find maps through the Munda Biddi Trail Foundation.

Larapinta Trail (Northern Territory) — a 223km trail through the West MacDonnell Ranges, demanding in heat, terrain, and water planning. It’s a serious test of pacing yourself and pushing through discomfort in an unforgiving environment. 

Pacific Crest Trail (United States) — a 4,265km trail from Mexico to Canada that takes most thru-hikers four to six months to complete. It’s become a well-known symbol of what it looks like to commit to a goal so large it has to be broken into thousands of smaller, repeatable days. 

Annapurna Circuit (Nepal) — a multi-week trek through the Himalayas that includes a brutal high-altitude pass over 5,000m. It’s a good example of perseverance under physical strain that can’t just be pushed through with willpower alone — it also demands patience, acclimatisation, and knowing when to slow down. 

Appalachian Trail (United States) — a roughly 3,500km trail from Georgia to Maine that takes most thru-hikers five to six months to walk, with fewer than one in four who set out actually finishing the whole thing. Decades of hiker journals make it one of the most documented real-world records of what day-to-day perseverance actually looks like, doubts and all.

Experiences

Pick something with a defined end point that’s genuinely hard for you specifically — not necessarily impressive to other people, just hard for you. Training for a fun run or trail event over several weeks is a good structured option, since the training itself becomes the daily practice of persevering.

Learn an instrument, language, or skill with a visible plateau — most skills have a stretch where progress seems to stall completely. Persisting through that flat patch, rather than switching to something new the moment it gets boring, is exactly the muscle perseverance skill-builds.

Volunteer for a long-running community project (a habitat restoration effort, a mentoring program, a long-term fundraiser) where the payoff is months away rather than immediate — this builds tolerance for delayed reward, which is a core ingredient of persistence.

Take on a physical endurance challenge appropriate to your fitness level and build up to it gradually — even a couch-to-5k style program teaches the exact mechanics of pushing past the point where quitting feels easier.

Challenges

Confident: The 21-Day Streak

Pick one small habit connected to a goal you care about — 15 minutes of practice, a short run, one page of writing. Commit to doing it every day for 21 days, no matter how small the effort on the hard days.

On day 21, look back at the log. Notice which days were hardest and what got you through them anyway.

Excellent: The Boring Middle

Choose a skill you already know has a slow, unglamorous middle stretch (an instrument, a sport, a language). Instead of avoiding that stretch, schedule three sessions this week specifically inside it.

• Before each session, write one sentence on why you’re doing this.
• After each session, write one sentence on what felt different, even slightly.
• At the end of the week, decide whether to keep going, adjust the goal, or take a real break — on purpose, not out of frustration.

Advanced: Climb Your Own Kokoda

Find a physically demanding local trail or set of stairs near you (it doesn’t have to be an actual Kokoda memorial walk). Do it once as a baseline, then again a few weeks later.

• Time yourself or note how you felt on the first attempt.
• Train specifically for it in the weeks between — walking, running, or strength work.
• Repeat the route and compare how it felt the second time.