Persevere

Never give up.

I interviewed a retired businessman recently for my "What's Your Story?" radio series on the Virginia Voice, a station that broadcasts to the vision-impaired and other print-handicapped people in Richmond and the Hampton Roads area.

I usually end each interview by asking my guest what advice he or she has for people just starting out. A surprising number of them say something like "never give up."

The businessman I interviewed told me about his 42 years of building his small Richmond company. He started with just himself and a building with a dirt floor. By the time he sold it 42 years later, he had 57 employees, and he had made a lot of money.

Over the course of those four decades, he sold about 40 different products. Most of them went nowhere. But a few filled a niche in the market. Those were the ones that made his fortune for him.

His advice? Persevere. Leave behind the ideas that don't work. Focus on the ones that do. Always keep your eye out for new possibilities, new ways of solving old problems. Keep on keeping on.

Never give up.

Luck and timing, of course, are important factors. However, you can't necessarily control them. But you can control yourself and how dedicated you are to success, no matter how you choose to define success.

So, as I'm summarizing life's lessons in these recent blog posts, I offer this nugget: Try, try, and try again. If you want something bad enough, be persistent. Be tenacious.

Take it from the late Steve Jobs, the co-founder and CEO of Apple, Inc., who said, "I'm convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance."