William Feather on “Perseverance Rewarded”

In “Perseverance Rewarded” William Feather offers some good advice for getting started. Many folks succeed because they don’t realize how hard it is to accomplish what they have set out to do (of course several orders of magnitude more fail).

Perseverance Rewarded

“Too many of us wait to do the perfect thing, with the result that we do nothing. […] No one gets anywhere until he gets rid of the idea that his first effort is going to startle the world.

The way to get ahead is to start now. If you start now, you will know a lot next year that you don’t know now and that you wouldn’t know next year if you had waited. While a lot of us are waiting until conditions are just right before we go ahead, others are stumbling along, fortunately ignorant of the dangers that beset them. By the time that we, in our superior wisdom, decide to make a start, we discover that the fools, in their blundering way, have traveled quite a distance.

Every man who makes unusual progress seems to have been something of a fool, by which I mean that he undertook things no solidly sensible fellow would attempt. I hear startling confessions from men who quit good jobs with sure pay to tackle insecure jobs with uncertain pay. Men go into business ventures with little but hope to sustain and feed them, and twenty years later you hear they have been ordered by their doctor to take a trip around the world.

None of these men would dare to live their lives over again. Success hung on too thin a thread. In retrospect, they know the dangerous passes through which they traveled, but in the excitement of the chase they were spared all doubts. They simply plunged forward, protected by their very ignorance and assurance.

[…]

The men who, ten or twenty years from now, will be the envy of the rest of us are this minute beating their way through the brambles of the world’s indifference. They are not doing much, but they are doing something, making a little progress each day. Out of the experience they are gaining they will someday do the perfect or near perfect thing, and thus command the world’s admiration.”

William Feather in “The Business of Life“

There are several good insights here:

• Getting started in an exploratory mindset, or at least a balancing a certain amount of planning and reflection with tinkering, experimentation, and opening yourself to serendipity is more likely to find a way forward.
• Making small bets you can afford to lose but which can teach you things about the market or possible solutions allows you many chances at figuring out how to succeed.
• You are more likely to stumble over something in new surroundings or in conversations with strangers than have a flash of insight in familiar surroundings with old friends.
• There is a fair amount of chance and uncertainty which means you have to budget for multiple attempts that don’t work or make a small step forward.

Related Blog Posts

• Dora Mekouar on Featherisms
• William Feather entry in the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History

Other Posts About William Feather

• William Feather’s “The Business of Life”
• More from William Feather’s “The Business of Life”
• William Feather on “Dead Business”