EP TWO

In this podcast episode, Bella and Maddie discuss the virtue of perseverance and how it applies to their own lives. They define perseverance as finishing what one starts, despite obstacles, and finding pleasure in completing tasks. Maddie shares her experience of giving up on her dream of playing college volleyball and redirecting her focus to academics. They reference a podcast on grit, where Dr. Angela Duckworth defines it as the power of passion and perseverance. They emphasize the importance of trying new things and being open to discovering what one truly wants in life. They also discuss Thomas Edison's perseverance and how he turned failures into successes. Bella shares her personal experience of persevering through a speech impediment as a child. They conclude by encouraging listeners to practice perseverance in their everyday lives to make it a habit. Hey everyone, welcome back to Leadership Leads Podcast. I'm Bella and today I'm here with Maddie. Hey everyone, and thank you Bella for inviting me on the podcast today. I'm really excited. Yeah, of course. And today we will be digging into the virtue of perseverance and how it continues to play a role in our everyday lives. And on the Be A Strength profile, perseverance is defined as finishing what one starts, persevering in a course of action in spite of obstacles, and taking pleasure in completing tasks. And given that, me and Maddie said that given a difficult situation, you know how to plan, execute, and know how to get everything done without giving up. And for me, I do that in my everyday life right now, just being a freshman in college. Starting college with a different amount of workload, I had to get used to it and know how to get it done without giving up. What about you Maddie? Yeah, so for me it took a lot of perseverance to even get to college. I always wanted to play volleyball. My sister played in college and that was just my dream. I started playing at the age of 12, and that's kind of what I was shooting for my entire life. But it got to a point in my junior year where I was like, what am I doing this for anymore? I kind of fell out of love with the sport. I was just pursuing a dream that I no longer had a passion for. And so I switched my focus over to academics and I started right up in applying and college applications. And so I think it took a lot of perseverance for me to say no to a dream that I'd been pursuing for so long, just because it wasn't really what I was interested in anymore. And I saw this come up in a podcast that I listened to with Brene Brown and Dr. Angela Duckworth. It's called Grit and the Importance of Trying New Things. And in this podcast, Dr. Angela and Brene Brown define grit as the power of passion and perseverance. And an interesting quote from Duckworth was, the idea is that when you want to accomplish something great in your life, it's going to take a long time. So you have to have the passion and perseverance over really long periods. People who end up with passion and perseverance for long-term goals are actually doing more sampling, more quitting things and saying, oh, no, that's not for me. And so what I got from that is that a huge part of perseverance, what a lot of people don't talk about, is you have to be open to trying things and learning that they're not really for you and pursuing through being like, okay, so this is not the direction I want for my life. What else can I do? Perseverance is not saying I'm going to stick with this, whether it's for me or not. And I think an interesting point that Dr. Duckworth stressed is I don't want the lesson to be that you should already know what you want to do in your life at some point prematurely at a premature young age. And I feel like this is something I've definitely felt in college. It was stressful coming into college. I'm in a medical professional major, and it seems like everyone around me is just set in stone with what they want to do. They want to go to med school and become a doctor. And I'm just working hard at being open and figuring out actually what I do want to pursue in my life and taking classes that will challenge me and will show me, oh, I'm interested in this, but I'm not interested in this. And so my favorite quote that tied into this from the podcast was from Brene Brown, and she shares, but I think grit in kids to me is about the passion and perseverance of trying things that you're not already good at doing. And I think that really changed the definition of perseverance in my mind. It doesn't mean stick to what you're doing no matter what. Perseverance means committing to working hard to accomplish something. And for us in college, we might not even know what that is yet. We first have to figure out what we do and don't like to do, and to continue to persevere through that is a learning process. A great example of someone who persevered through hard things is Thomas Edison. So he grew up and sporadically went to school for only four years. He was labeled as a misfit because he was hard of hearing and easily got bored in classrooms, and the teachers decided that he didn't belong there. On his own, he became an avid reader, a trained boy, a telegrapher, and he moved on to entrepreneurship later on in his life. He actually invented a duplex telegraph and a printer, and he's widely known for his work with the light bulb, but I'm going to focus in on his work mining. He left his electrical business after his company merged with another company, and they dropped his name after all the hard work that he put into creating the light bulb. And the quote that he said was, I'm going to do something now so different and so much bigger than anyone else has ever done before, people will forget that my name was ever connected to anything electrical. I think that right there sums up perseverance. He discovered so much and invented the light bulb, and after people took his name out of that invention, he was like, okay, I'm just going to move on to bigger and better things and create a name for myself somewhere else. And so he recognized that there was an iron ore shortage, and he saw a way to economize the mining of low-grade ore and turn it into a profitable product. However, things didn't go as planned for him. His equipment was faulty, there was abrasive dust that covered everything, and actually several men died on the job. And so from 1994 to 1997, Edison spent all of his time working. He only went home on Sundays. He had to frequently shut down the plant and rebuild and redesign, and he lost a lot of money and investors and workers left. But he continued to persevere through the hard times and never once gave up. It ends up that high-grade iron ore became plentiful again, so his work went unneeded, and this didn't stop him for a second, and he hopped over to the cement industry. He actually designed a new kiln that operated so effectively that he set new industry standards. He could create an entire house out of cement in one day. And the cement company repaid his debt from the ore mining, and I think cement just embodies Edison's life. He's always learned to turn failure into success and never give up when things don't go his way. He perseveres through the difficult times, and that is what left him so successful in his career. So Maddie has brought in perfect examples on how people use perseverance to be successful in their own careers, but personally I had to use perseverance as a little kid and just to get through my everyday life. I grew up with a speech impediment called developmental apraxia, and during this I couldn't form any words. I remember crying because no one would ever understand me in preschool, but my parents and my brother really helped me persevere through this. They sat me down, kept me focused, and we had flashcards on how to pronounce words. I had little pictures to remember how to pronounce even just small letters. So I think just working through that alone and learning how to make connections without fully being able to understand other people and even myself. So I think just going through that helped me learn how to persevere, and I think using one of the seven strategies of virtue cultivation, which is doing it by habit, I think I've done that since I have been a little girl, and I think me and Maddie can use this in any difficult situation, whether it be little or big, to just keep going at it, and it'll be a habit. We don't even have to think, okay, wait, I have to persevere through this. It's just something we'll be able to do without being able to think about it, and I think it'll be so useful moving forward, whether that be just waking up for a 9 a.m. We need to get in the habit of not giving up and getting to that 9 a.m. class or even after college and thinking about our first apartment we have to do, finding a job, whether it be in the medical field or the hospitality field, whatever you want your job to be, or even starting a family. Every single thing is going to cause difficulties, and you need to be able to persevere it, know how to sit yourself down, and get yourself through it. It's such an inspiration hearing how perseverance impacts every single person's life in different ways. It's crazy to think about you, Bella, as a little girl persevering through your speech impediment, and flash forward to today, you're filming a podcast that just shows how far perseverance can bring all of us. We're faced with opportunities to continue to persevere every day, and I encourage everyone listening to this podcast to recognize when you may not feel encouraged to persevere. Practicing perseverance in your everyday life will make it a habit for you. And so for me, I'm committing to persevering through feeling tired in the morning, and I'm going to get up and work out. For the more I persevere, the more it will become a habit in my everyday life. And so that's all we have for you guys today. Thank you so much for tuning in to the Leadership Ladies Podcast, and get excited for our next episode coming out within the next two weeks. I want to give a special thanks to Emily and Tanisha for making this podcast come to life through our amazing editing and audio. See you guys next time.