Just What I Need Today

diet blog offers me exactly what I need to help get back on track. They think they're telling me about New Year's resolutions but really it is about how to persist. I need a summary here to remind me.

1. PERSIST. Don’t quit. “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.” Sir Winston Churchill
2. MAKE THE EFFORT. Work hard. Great comebackers use all the hours in the day. You can find your comeback right in the effort you make.
3. UNDERSTAND TRANSIENCE. Don’t extrapolate temporary setbacks into permanent defeat. “This, too, shall pass.”
   
4. CHANGE DIRECTION. Quincy Jones was a talented trumpeter, but after a stroke, he had to quit, and then became a legendary music producer.
5. EMPLOY SUPPORT. Stay away from the nay-sayers. Pack your corner with friends who won’t let you quit.
   
6. REPEAT. It took Sir Edmund Hillary two attempts to climb Everest, Peary eight times to reach the North Pole, and various authors scores and sometimes hundreds of tries to get their works published. Go again, and again, and ………
7. DREAM BIG. Your effort and ideas are worth many times what you may imagine. J.K. Rowling wrote her ideas about one “Harry Potter” during a train ride. It sold 100 million copies, and $4 billion movie box office, and counting. You can do much more than you imagine. Dream big.
8. STAY HUMBLE. Attitude -- is everything. When tennis master Andre Agassi fell from No. 1 to No. 141 (1997), he started over, went back to the minor leagues, upped his training, including weightlifting. It set the stage for greater things than ever before. Attitude – not image – is everything.
9. SELF-PROGRAM. Get a mantra. A psychiatrist-hypnotist provided Rachmaninoff the composer, who had a writing block, with a positive self-talk mantra: “You will begin your concerto. You will work with great facility. The concerto will be excellent.” It worked. He wrote his Piano Concerto No. 2.
10. PERSIST. It’s not over until you say so. Don’t say so.