Greatest Discovery by Earl Nightingale

Author:Earl Nightingale [Epub]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-03-08T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER VII

Stay with It

I always felt I was pretty good in the perseverance department. After all, writing a radio program every day for twenty-six years— that's about nine thousand radio programs, researched or thought of and then written one word at a time on a typewriter before being recorded for broadcast—6,300,000 words, one word at a time. It doesn't exactly label me a fly-by-night kind of person. But next to Diana, when it comes to perseverance, I'm still in kindergarten. She is simply implacable. So between us, setting and reaching goals, no matter what their degree of difficulty, is not a matter for questioning. We do it.

We've all seen motion pictures in which the hero, mustering that last cubic centimeter of strength, crawls over the final sand dune to see, to his delighted astonishment, a shady oasis with abundant fresh water and the cheerful leader of a camel train who volunteers to give him a free ride back to civilization and ultimate victory. It is mustering that last bit of energy, for just one more try and then, after that, just one more, that often leads to victory in real life.

"Nothing takes the place of persistence." Do you remember that little essay so popular thirty or forty years ago? It's true— nothing takes the place of persistence, once you know that what you're seeking is right for you.

When I resigned my cushy job at CBS in Chicago in 1950 and started my own program on WGN, I also agreed to help sell time on my show by calling on advertising agencies. So I would write my next day's program at night, at home, then first thing the next morning I would start hitting the advertising agencies to tell them why their clients should be advertising on my daily radio program. I was completely unknown in the Chicago market or anywhere else; my time on the air amounted to just fifteen minutes each afternoon. My prospects would say, "No, sorry, your program is not in 'drive time'"—a ridiculous cliché, since at any time in Chicago there were a zillion cars on the roads and highways, to say nothing of the ten zillion people listening to their radios at home in about a six-state area. But that's the kind of answer I got, and so I became acquainted with the word no. After making calls on numerous agencies and getting nothing but nos, I would then rush to my tiny office in the Tribune Tower, get my program ready for broadcasting, and when the red light came on, I had to be cheerful!

Month after month I made the rounds, and as I did, my thoughts often drifted back to those untroubled days in the quiet, air-conditioned studios at CBS, when all that was expected of me was the occasional exercise of my larynx. "Stay with it," I would tell myself. One time I surprised a gentleman standing next to me in the men's room of a Chicago high-rise by actually muttering it aloud.

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