I’m sharing this post I wrote back in August – I think maybe I need the reminder more than you guys.

I’ve been enjoying the weather the past several days. It was about 98 degrees with 100% humidity while I was back home in Alabama last week and when I returned back to Chi-town it was a cool 72 degrees, give or take.

So, while sitting out on my back patio enjoying being outside since I’ve been home and just two days ago I noticed several spider webs. So I pulled out the wicker broom from the garage to knock them down out of the corners on the brick. I’d thought I’d do a little cleaning while watering my herb garden.

I go out to the patio again just today, (two days later) and noticed that the darn spiders have already built a completely new web in the same corner. I was like, “What the……” and then said to myself “well if that isn’t some determination.” And of course as always thought “now that’s a blog post right there.” (You know you talk to yourself too)

I think we all go through times where we start out with a bang – going in full force toward our goal, our dream and then something comes along and causes us to become discouraged. We’ve all had days where we thought that maybe we should just give up, quit, and do something else. Possibly just abandon that thing that we’re passionate about, those things that keep us up at night. Sometimes we just think because we’re not seeing much progress at the moment that we should just stop the nonsense and go get a 9 – 5er somewhere.

And of course some of us have those (whom we’re the closest to) telling us to just give it up and forget about it – that we’re just dreamers and nothing will ever come of that which used to burn inside of us.

But how many people in our history continued to persevere –  who if they hadn’t, would have missed out on seeing that thing in their minds eye come to fruition. I wonder also how many have given up just before seeing their dream come to pass.

I came across an article wherein someone asked the question “How many times did Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers fail?” I loved one readers response that said:

This is woolly thinking and lacking in understanding of the development process. They didn’t “fail”. They succeeded. They required many, many trials and experiments before succeeding, but no-one counts the trials and experiments. Why should they be called “failures” anyway ? Do you expect someone to think “Right ; today I’m going to make a light-bulb”, or “Next week I think I shall make a flying machine”, and get it right immediately? There is no count of the unsuccessful attempts. They were essential parts of the process of gathering data leading to a successful conclusion. The same principles which were used in the final successful trials also applied to all of the early attempts. None of the prototypes were failures in that sense, they just weren’t developed far enough.

In fact, a few of Mr. Edisons most famous quotes are about just that when he said “I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process” and “I haven’t failed, I’ve found 10,000 ways that didn’t work.”

Legend has it that the Wright Brother’s plane busted or crashed a few times, many times, and then one day it worked. Not too bad for three people without a college degree.

I thought about how long it must have taken that spider to make a new web and / or if he worked non-stop from the time I tore the web down to right before me finding it just today. I just read a little on how long it takes most spiders to weave a web and come to find out, it usually only takes them an hour.

Photo Credit: davidkphotography.com