Perseverance (#94)

“I ended up persevering through roadblocks by just not giving up. I used a lot of persistence balanced with humor balanced with vulnerability and I asked people to help.”

Sara Blakely, Founder and CEO Spanx 

Sara Blakely is the founder and owner of Spanx, a private company that makes slimming undergarments for women and men. In 2012, she joined the ranks of the Forbes’ Magazine’s Billionaires List as the youngest, self-made woman billionaire. Growing her company from a side hustle out of her apartment to a global giant, Sara exhibited incredible persistence and perseverance.

While working at Danka (now part of Ricoh), an office supply company as a salesperson and national sales trainer, Blakely identified a problem she knew needed to be solved. She liked the slimming effect of panty hose, but not the heat during the summer, so, she cut the feet off a pair of panty hose and wore them underneath a pair of slacks and voila! Spanx was born. She spent the next two years refining the idea until she was ready to start the company as a side project. To grow the company, she filed her own patent for the design, cold-called factories to manufacture the product, designed the packaging, created her own website, called fashion reporters to get the company positive exposure, and fulfilled orders from her living room.

More important to Blakely was the persistence she had acquired selling office products door-to-door for Danka. She drew on those memories and experiences to call on retailers to carry Spanx. She got rejected a lot, but she made a few sales, and remained persistent. She went to malls on the weekend, set up a booth, and sold them directly to customers. Slowly, her customer base grew.

She also shipped several free samples to Oprah Winfrey’s stylist Andre Walker. Walker shared them with Winfrey, and Oprah liked them so much, she named them one of her favorite products in 2000. Spanx sales exploded overnight, earning the company $4 Million in its first year. It has been profitable every year and has never taken investment capital.

Sara quit Danka after Oprah. She also smartly hired talent to bridge her gaps. Employee #5 at Spanx was Laurie Ann Goldman, a ten-year veteran of Coca-Cola. Goldman provided Spanx the big company perspective and helped Blakely scale and run the company. Last year, the company had $400 million in revenue.

Over the past twenty years, Sara Blakely exhibited perseverance by building on small gritty wins and creating momentum for herself and Spanx. Grit is best defined as “the will to persevere to achieve long term goals.” A person’s grit is built upon a goal, their perseverance, their resilience, their courage to deal with the fear of failure, and their drive.

Perseverance

Perseverance is persisting in doing something difficult. It is the second step in growing one’s personal grit. I talked about goal setting, the first step in growing your grit, in Post #86. Here is one example of personal perseverance on my path to growing my own personal grit.

This December, I joined the Rapha 500 which had a simple premise — ride 500 kilometers (310 miles) between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve (8 days) to be eligible to win a bicycle. To keep things interesting, Rapha (a cycling sportswear company) would post that I had completed 20, 40, 60, and 80 percent of the Rapha 500 on Strava, an app that tracks exercise via GPS data, with multiple social networking features.

Up until that point, I had never ridden more than 275 miles in 8 days before. While I know there are some incredible cyclists out there that have ridden a lot farther than I have, I am proud to say that I rode 347 miles during the Rapha 500. With my longest day at 64.5 miles and my shortest at 25 miles, I rode every day, averaging 43 miles per day. It required all of my perseverance, and more, to accomplish that achievement.

So, how did I develop the perseverance to ride 347 miles in 8 days? How can you develop more perseverance to apply towards your next tough, long-term task? I have found three things exceptionally helpful in building perseverance – small grit wins, remembering past persistence, and building momentum.

First, I started with small grit wins. In addition to grit being an acquired skill, it is transferable. If you are gritty in one area it can transfer to another. For me, walking my dog Samantha daily is a small gritty win. Every day that I get out of bed and walk the dog I claim as a small victory. Plus, the neighbors see me, so there is a social accountability aspect to doing the walks as well. As I struggled to get myself motivated to ride the bike, I drew upon the perseverance and grit I had gained walking Samantha.

Second, remember past persistence. Drawing on memories of past persistent efforts is a great way to increase your perseverance. Think about one of your gritty accomplishments that you are particularly proud of. It could be something like running a marathon, writing a book, graduating from college, or learning how to play the guitar. Whatever it was, visualize the actions, behaviors, and habits that it took to accomplish it. Once you have thought through the past persistence and the success that came from your hard work, the current challenge shouldn’t seem as daunting.

As I pedaled my bike in December, I drew upon my past persistence efforts and one memory, in particular, was helpful. In 2014, I got into deadlifting. I read everything I could on it, I got coaches to look at my technique, and watched countless YouTube videos to perfect my form. More importantly, I was persistent and made sure that every week I did five sets of five deadlifts, adding a little weight to my lifts each week. Eventually, I was able to deadlift my goal of 405 pounds.

Finally, build momentum. Momentum is a powerful tool. It makes it difficult to stop things once they are set in motion. In a corporate environment, Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, has called momentum the ‘flywheel effect’. He defines the flywheel as the process that turns good companies into great companies “as a cumulative process – step, by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel – that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.”

A corollary to momentum, or the flywheel, is the power of the streak. A streak in this context means to do something on consecutive days without fail. Baseball players, especially hitters, spend lots of time and energy trying the create the conditions of a streak. Wade Boggs, a great hitter for the Boston Red Sox, ate chicken every day because he believed he hit better after eating it. It must have worked because he had a lifetime batting average of .328 and was elected to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005.

Want to write a book? Write every day for 90 days. Put up a calendar and cross the days off one-by-one so you can see a visual representation of the streak. Want to do “Dry January”? Treat it as a streak of not drinking alcohol for 31 days. Tell a friend you are doing it and text or email every day you don’t drink for more accountability. Want to get healthier? Work out every day for a month. To get your streak going you may want to work out at the same time for the first week. Want to be a great baseball hitter? Go on a streak where you get a hit every game for a month.

Crash Davis, in the movie Bull Durham, said it best when he said, “You have to respect the streak.” In this context, he meant that baseball players, when they are on a hitting streak need to not change anything until the streak ends. A hitting streak is such a unicorn that it must be appreciated and allowed to run its course. Like with minor league baseball players, a streak can give us energy – both positive and negative. In this case, the streak of needing to put in miles every day created momentum and helped get me across the finish line.

For me personally, when I set out on the gritty journey of completing the Rapha 500 I knew the goal but the path to achieving the goals wasn’t clear. However, I knew if I rode the bike every day it would get me closer to the goal. Once I got through the first three days, the momentum I had generated and the power of the streak of riding every day made it difficult to stop, even when I was tired and sore. Together, the momentum and power of the streak helped me to go farther in 8 days than I had ever done before.

Improving your perseverance isn’t easy. Whether you are building an undergarments company out of your apartment, riding your bike 347 miles in 8 days, or attempting to go 31 days without alcohol, you can use small wins, remember past persistence, and capitalize on momentum to forge your perseverance and build your grit.