Four words that mean pretty much the same, but tenacity wins hand down when it comes to the sort of consistent application that takes and shapes an idea and makes it a reality.
Buzz words come and go. Happiness was around for a while. And then Resilience. During difficult, recessionary times resilience certainly has its place but it's tenacity that could make all the difference to whether or not you succeed with your idea. Not letting go, but holding on to it, exploring it, shaping it, developing it and believing in it is the only way to transform the abstract into reality. Otherwise it remains just an idea.
Reading about David Karp, the man who created the blogging website Tumblr (36 million users, 40 billion views a day) I am struck not so much by his idea for the website he produced, but by his tenacity in exploring its possibilities, developing it and staying with it while others might have thought... what's the point of another blogging website?
Whether you take an existing idea and make it better or dream up something completely new, whether it's Tumblr or Spanx, the difference between the ideas we know about and the ones we don't is that someone, often an individual, just kept plugging away with it until it became a reality. The original idea may come in and out of focus, but it remains at the core to be explored, shaped, developed and kept alive, coming to fruition often just slightly ahead of the market curve. Then you hold your breath. But along with that first 1% of inspiration came 99% of perspiration: it seems the old cliches hold true. Tenacity works.
It doesn't really matter what you want to do - create a new product, run the marathon, compose the next Bohemian Rhapsody, improve an exam grade, write a book - out there are a whole host of things that seem somehow so obvious now, it's hard to imagine a time when they didn't previously exist, but all it takes is the first step, and the next, and the next... And the next.
That's tenacity.
