To close out the week, I wanted to post some thoughts on a quote I’ve been thinking a lot about lately.
In the typical Google search for the quotation, it’s quoted by marketers, life coaches and sofa philosophers throughout the Internet. This contradictory post that states that this is the dumbest thing ever repeated by smart people stands in the face of all these hoorah-hoorah posts that use the quotation as a motivation to enact change in peoples’ lives, marketing campaigns, organizations or anything else anyone can think of.
Of course, this quotation is not meant to be taken literally, it’s origins are not actually verifiable and it’s not universally applicable.
The quotation in fact encourages experimentation by trying different things. Don’t alter your existence completely, but understand that eventually you need to smarten up if things you are doing aren’t producing the results you desire.
Similarly, it’s well known that persistence is the most common trait that characterizes a successful entrepreneur who’s made it. It could also be said that the quotation discourages persistence. A good quote (source):
Sometimes doing the same thing a second time when it hasn’t worked the first is indeed just foolish. But sometimes it’s shrewd. Wisdom consists, in part, in knowing the difference. Flexibility is a virtue. But in most matters, flexibility properly kicks in only after persistence has been given a fair chance.
So there we go. Persistence and experimentation working one after another. One without the other really isn’t worth much independent of the other.
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