When should you persist with a hard goal and change your approach?
Suppose you want to learn a favourite poem by heart. You read it, close the book and begin. The opening comes easily, but halfway through you lose the next line. You look it up, then start again from the beginning.
By the end of the evening, you have recited the opening many times and reached the later verses only a few. You have worked at the poem, but each restart has taken you away from the part you cannot yet recall.
Another attempt could help if it gives that difficulty more attention. Persistence becomes useful when you let what happened last time change what you do next.
A Spark from Vicissitudes of Life
Hard-to-achieve things remain so until one of us chooses to take the chance and not give up.
This time, you begin with the troublesome verse. You read it closely, put the page aside and try it on its own. There is no long opening to get through before you reach the line you keep missing. When you forget it, you can check it immediately and try that passage again.
Suppose this helps. After several attempts, you can recall each verse separately. Yet when you try the whole poem, you stop between two of them. Knowing the passages on their own has not been enough to carry you from one to the next.
That is a different difficulty from the first one. You have learned something, although you still cannot do the whole thing you set out to do. Now you can practise the end of one verse together with the beginning of the next, then see whether that makes the transition easier in a full attempt.
The method has changed twice. Neither change required abandoning the poem, and neither could have been chosen from the instruction to “keep trying” alone. The actual attempts showed you where more work was needed.
In Life is a slim chance, Innocent presents life’s unlikely existence as an invitation to take chances in one’s own life. His appeal is to attempt difficult things rather than leave the chance untouched, and to keep going. Once you do attempt something, you have contact with difficulties that hope or reluctance alone could not reveal.
Not every attempt will be so informative. You may have an evening when the lines simply will not come, or find that the latest change makes no noticeable difference. One disappointing result need not settle the method. Look across the attempts before treating a single good or bad one as the whole account.
Continuing also remains a choice. Learning the poem may be worth the time because you want its words available without a page. If that no longer matters enough, you can stop trying to memorise it and still enjoy reading it. The effort already spent does not oblige you to finish. What gives another attempt a purpose is a goal you still want and something useful you can now try towards it.
Related lessons
AI-generated from Innocent Mwatsikesimbe's writing.
Keep a Spark close
Read Spreuke on Android and receive a new Spark each morning.
