Great Achievement Results from Perseverance

By Deb Boelkes

Can you name a significant accomplishment in your life—one you were extremely proud of—that was without challenge? Have you found it easy to achieve your wildest dreams with little effort? If so, you’re lucky. Most great accomplishments are born of persistence—persevering with determination, even when the challenges faced are exceedingly complex and the going is exceedingly rough.   

The achievements I’ve been proudest of throughout my life were those I wasn’t at all sure I could pull off, yet I gave my best efforts despite the difficulties encountered.

One such experience came early in my career at IBM when I was offered a promotion and relocation to lead a business development effort with one of IBM’s largest accounts.  The opportunity came about thanks to a cocktail party where IBM’s CEO met the account’s CEO. Together they concocted a moonshot-plot to create the kind of bleeding edge technology that could catapult the customer’s global forward-thinking reputation.

Although I had never met with this high-profile account before, I accepted the opportunity—believing it was destined to succeed since both CEO’s were behind it. Little did I know what awaited me.

When I finally met with the customer’s project team, I found an environment full of animosity and disfunction. None of their team members were in favor of working with IBM. Each had other vendors they preferred to involve. No one appreciated being told what to do by their CEO. Worse yet, no one seemed to enjoy working together. Each seemed on a mission to make themselves look good by disparaging the others.

I quickly assessed the project to be a no-win situation, but it was too late to back out. I’d already relocated, not to mention our CEO would never accept anything short of a successful outcome. I had to find a way to accomplish the mission, despite the now obvious and yet unseen obstacles.

Long story short, it took months of dogged determination, doing everything I could to make myself and IBM indispensable to everyone on the customer’s team. I committed to each that my highest priority was to enable them to exceed their respective performance plans and make them look good in the eyes of their CEO.

It was a monumental effort, especially in the early days before I gained their trust. Yet I persevered, no matter how maligned their intra-departmental relationships seemed to be. Developing the bleeding-edge technology seemed trivial compared to mitigating the rivalry and personality conflicts between the client’s team members.

In the end, we developed the first real-world application of speech-to-text conversion, where inbound callers could say to a computer why they were calling in plain English—something that’s now common place. My proudest accomplishment was hand-delivering that first one-million-dollar customer payment to IBM. That was 30 years ago.

So how did I do it?

Looking back now, I give a great deal of credit to my extraordinary IBM team members—on the sales team, at division headquarters, and in the product development labs. Each of them was every bit as committed to the effort as I was.

I must also credit an inspirational role model from my college days at UCLA, the legendary basketball coach John Wooden. Throughout that project, so many of Wooden’s most-noted quotes kept going through my mind:

“Adversity often produces an unexpected opportunity. Look for it! Appreciate and utilize it! This is difficult to do if you’re feeling sorry for yourself because you’re faced with adversity.”

“It’s important to keep trying to do what you think is right, no matter how hard it is or how often you fail. Never stop trying.”

“Stay the course. When thwarted, try again; harder, smarter. Persevere relentlessly.” 

Thanks to all the adversities and challenges I had to overcome on that project, I learned how important mindset and perseverance are in realizing a great accomplishment. 

Another inspirational “role model of perseverance” is someone I met years later and featured in my first two books, The WOW Factor Workplace and Heartfelt Leadership: Colonel Debra M. Lewis (US Army, Retired). Col. Deb—as I now call her—had a remarkable 34-year military career which began with her attending the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where she was part of the very first class to include women.

Col. Deb recently wrote a chapter titled “The Mental Toughness Edge in Leadership” in a new book called Peak Performance: Mindset Tools for Leaders. In it, she tells of her own personal journey persevering through the challenges and uncomfortable situations she encountered as one of the first 118 women “allowed” to join the corps of 1350+ male Cadets in 1976. To say these first women of West Point were unwelcome is an understatement. Out of the 118 who entered the Academy that year, only  62 persevered through to graduate in 1980.

In her story, Col. Deb quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson:

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.”

Col. Deb then follows up with her own quote:

“Yes, extreme stress offers us the opportunity to discover what lies within us and achieve more than we previously imagined possible.”

Within this ongoing series of blog posts focused on Morale Character and Virtuous Leadership, I have also credited a public charter school in Jacksonville, Florida called Cornerstone Classical Academy, for their mission to develop virtuous leaders by instilling in K – 8^th graders values and virtues like Perseverance, which they define as:

“Applying consistent effort to the best of our abilities, regardless of the level of difficulty…and responding creatively to overcome obstacles, and ask for help when necessary.”

I hope that you, too, will always choose to apply consistent effort to the best of your abilities—regardless of the level of difficulty—and respond creatively to overcome every obstacle you encounter, so that you, too, may relish in the pride of great achievement.

Do not quit and do not fear. Keep on keepin’ on…and persevere with faith.

With determined perseverance, you can and WILL achieve more than you ever imagined possible.