How To Never Give Up: The Intelligent Way

 
By Anubhav Srivastava ( Register for his Workshop – Build Super Confidence For Super Success!)

 

How to never give up and practice persistence the intelligent way? Sometimes you need to quit the wrong path to get to the right destination. Persistence is indeed a heroic trait if applied correctly. But many times, the way people persist is just stupid. In this article you will learn what is the intelligent way to never give up. A way in which persistence actually pays off and does not lead to you going around in circles. To know how, keep reading this article!

A personal story of Stupid Persistence

My parents are from Allahabad, India which is a relatively smaller town as compared to the capital city of India I live in (New Delhi). My grandmother lives in Allahabad so we used to visit the city often in our childhood. This incident is from 2003 when the Internet was still in its nascent stages in India, especially in a smaller town like Allahabad. Today there are things like mobile Internet for travellers, but back in those days if you did not have a permanent connection in the city you were visiting, you had to visit an Internet café where you would pay by the hour to surf the Internet.

Now I loved going to my grandmother’s house but back in those days, going there would mean there would be no way to access the internet. My grandmother has a pretty big house and they always had some students as tenants that used to rent a few of the rooms. When I went to Allahabad in 2003, I told her, I needed to find an Internet café.

She introduced me to a guy who was a tenant and was preparing for Civil Services examinations.They are one of the most prestigious and notoriously tough to crack examinations meant for respectable, well paying and secure government jobs in India. He had been trying for many years but was unable to get through, although he was very proud of the fact he had not given up for 5 years. At the same time I never saw him study. I stayed there for almost 20 days and never saw him open a book at day or night.

When I first met the guy, the first thing he said was that this house was in a very old area, and there was no chance of an Internet Cafe here, so we needed to go look elsewhere. So we got in the Rickshaw (A bicycle attached to a cart that can seat passengers) and went looking everywhere. Everywhere we went either the Internet Cafe wasn’t there or it was closed. Finally I started getting frustrated and he kept telling me, “Be positive. Be positive” , but this positive guy never bothered to ask anyone where the Internet Cafe was. So I finally asked a few people and they all said they didn’t know of any such place there.

The guy arrogantly proclaimed “Hah! What will these fools know. All of these are dumb looking people, I am pretty sure there is an Internet café here. Don’t be negative, be positive!!” But his positivity was not working and was extremely irritating. So finally I told him, “Look I have had enough of your positive nonsense, I am going home!” and I hired another Rickshaw and came back. That day I realized that too much of positive thinking is a bad idea.

Because I was a little irritated, and hungry I decided to get some snacks from a few old shops behind the house and maybe look for an Internet cafe the next day. So I went there and decided to and guess what, right next to those shops, there was an Internet Cafe!
So this guy who was telling me to be positive, the one who lived around the area for a long time, made me roam all around Allahabad for no reason, ignored the people who said they didn’t know of any Internet Cafe in the areas we went to, and wasted several hours had no idea what we were looking for was right in our backyard. Right in the beginning we could have found it, but the guy made an assumption, “Oh this is an old neighbourhood, there cannot be an Internet Cafe here.”

 

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