This is the belief I always keep in mind for years when I learned this lesson from many famous and super successful entrepreneurs such as Jack Ma, Jeff Bezos, Gary Vee, Grant Cardone,…

They are my idols not only because of their success but also their working ethics. These people all believe that success will come when we have a great goal which makes us feel inspired to achieve every morning when we wake up and keep consistency to work on it until we can get it.

And I believe that in everyone, we all have our personal goals, the things that we really want to achieve in our lives in each specific period of time.

Someone can have big goals such as building electric cars, flying to the moon or building up the billion dollars unicorn company such as Elon Musk while someone’s goal just simply to have a happy family with a nice house, beautiful car, and a vacation per year.

We are all different in the way we set goals and choose what we want to pursue in life. But there is one thing we all in the common is

We all need to work hard and consistent with our goals if we want to make it come true.

If we don’t pay attention to the goals and put in the hard work to do it for weeks, months, or even years. We will never get it. But when we commit to ourselves that we will consistent on the goal, it’s doesn’t matter how long it will take for us, but finally, we will get it.

As Confucius used to say

“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”

But how to build up the persistent character to help us keep working harder and longer to achieve the goal is something we can learn together as common habits that anyone can develop.

No.1 habit of Highly Persistent People: Practice writing journal daily

This is the habit that personally, I did for years. And this is also the question that I heard from many of my friends when I share with them the way how I can keep focusing on achieving my long-term goal.

“Why practice writing journal daily can help to build the character of persistence?”.

This is because when you start to journal your day, you will see yourself in a clearer picture, plan out what you need to do in a day to achieve your ambitious goal later; and can write down how your feel during the time you chase your dream.

It helps in tracking your process better and fills up your mind with energy and positive thoughts when you read and write what you plan to do and what you did to achieve your ambitious goals.

No.2 habit of Highly Persistent People: “5s Habit” to remove the negative thoughts

“5s Habit” is what I name it. This habit means that I give myself free to come up with any new thoughts, both good and bad. Then I will give them a chance to survive for 5s. After that, I delete all the negative thoughts out of my mind and start to work on my tasks instead of keep thinking.

Let make a simple example that I normally need to use this “5s habit” in the morning. This is when I set the alarm to wake up at 5 a.m and feel so lazy, sleepy to wake up.

Just want to stay on the bed, turn off the alarm, and sleep for couple more minutes. This is the “bad thought” that normally happens in my mind. Especially during the winter in Melbourne, when the temperature is just around 1–7 degrees.

To be honest, I don’t want to leave my warm bed at 5 a.m.

But I need to because it is a part of my daily schedule that I write in the journal. And this is a bonus point why I always try to make the journal every single day. Because it helps me to plan my day ahead. And gives me the motivation every single morning to wake up early and start doing exercise or working on my projects.

As I know that the feeling of sleeping more feel minutes will be comfortable, but the feeling of missing the tasks of the day is very upset.

And the idea of 5s means I still can enjoy a little bit of time sleeping more. While 5s doesn’t mean too much time but it still can make my mind feel comfortable by getting a little bit more sleep. But in another part of my mind, it wakes me up after 5s because it wants me to have enough time to achieve the tasks in a day.

For you, you can start to apply this method “5s habit” to make your decision and reduce the lazy thoughts that appear in your mind.

The key point to success when you apply this habit is to follow your daily schedule.

Anytime you feel confused or lazy to do something, let look back to your daily schedule, give you 5s to hesitate before working on your established timeline.

By doing this, you can control your time better and keep the focus on the tasks that helps you to achieve your long-term goals.

No.3 habit of Highly Persistent People: The habit of “never give up”

If you decide to work on something, even just a small task, let make sure to complete it and on time.

Do you still remember “the tortoise and the hare story”? Do you remember the reason why the tortoise that walks very slow can win the tortoise, one of the fastest animals in this forest?

It is all from the attitude “never give up” of the tortoise. On your journey to achieve your goal, you are lucky that you don’t need to compete with “a hare” to decide who wins, who lost.

What you really need to do is just focus on the goal, keep working on it, and never give up as the way how the tortoise did in your childhood’s story.

And as the tortoise walks the very small steps, every time, to complete the competition. You also just need to practice the habit of “never give up” and work on all your daily tasks, from the smallest to the biggest, to really achieve your goal.

No.4 habit of Highly Persistent People: The sharing habits

The persistence character is not only build-up from your physical work but it also comes from your inner feelings. And when you decide to work on a goal that you know can take years for you to achieve, many times you will want to give up if you don’t have anyone to share with you the feelings you are having.

This is also the same feeling that happens to me when I set the big goals for life that require me to have a great persistent character and put a lot of hard work into it.

If you just keep all the feelings inside you, it will make you feel overwhelmed and exhausted soon if your project is a long-term game.

But when you have someone who you can trust to share your feelings, your purposes, and your goals. This person gives you more motivation to work on your goals because you know that now, there is someone else who is also known and looking for seeing you complete this goal.

Learn to share, but choose the right people to share with!

When you just keep all the thoughts in your mind without sharing them with anyone else, you can easily forget about the goals and quit it because you think that if you do or not, nobody knows or care.

And for me, I practice my “sharing habit” with my mother, with who I normally share all the big goals that I plan to do. She doesn’t judge me on what I dream or set as a goal, what she does is just listen to and motivate me. And for me, she is the best listener I ever have met, who plays a very important role in my life.

So let find someone who you can trust, such as your siblings, parents to share with them your goals as a method to help you have more motivation to “run on the marathon game” to achieve your goal.

This is what I did for the last 9 months, a new good habit that I build up for myself.

It means that you will create a map to track your whole process to achieve your goal. It will help to show you what you did or any big events related to this goal that happened to you. So you can self-evaluate how many percent of the process did you complete and how long you need to keep going.

Let make it becomes easier for you to imagine this example. Let think you have a goal to reduce 5kgs in the next 4 months.

It means you have roughly 120 days to reduce your 5kgs of fat. So you can make a map of 120 days steps (each day means one step) and use the highlight pen to highlight when every day passes and write down what is the biggest achievement you did on this day to help you go closer to your goal.

By doing this, it helps you to track your journey better and know what you should add, remove, or adjust to create a better result for your weight goal.

Final thoughts

These 5 habits are the ways to help you boost your mood, improve your ability, and keep your focus on the real goals while reducing the distraction. Therefore, these habits can be well-known as the vital roles in helping you to build up a persistent character.

And like many other good characters that you want to develop in life, the persistent character also takes time to grow. And by applying the appropriate methods and right habits, you can own this character faster than you can expect.

So, let start to add more good habits to practice in your to-do list from today to make the persistent character soon be your own.

If you want to read more about personal development topics, let check it out at “Wiki Personal Development”.