"They keep telling you that persistence is the secret & the key to success, and to everything. But you persist, and sweat and suffer, and work seems to you more laborious & tedious day after day, and you feel retained to make a single step forward by some malevolent force.
"There is not only persistence in hard work, but also another secret which is just as important. Many are those who stubbornly persist in their mistakes. They are persistent, but it doesn't help them. Likewise you, also, can persist in mistakes when you work, or train, if you are not attentive & careful. And then that second secret which must walk hand in hand with persistence, is: Intelligence.
"Now you know why the most persistent work brings you no satisfaction. You must work with intelligence to achieve your aims. Hard work without intelligence is lost effort, energy, time, and all else which you invest in it. If you work intelligently you will cut half the time of your labour, and progress with a rapidity you had never thought possible before applying it. The more intelligently you work, the more miraculous will your progress seem to you.
"The idea of persistence should not blot out in our minds the preoccupation of how we must work: we must endeavour to acquire more & more intelligence, more & more knowledge, until we don't make the same mistakes anymore. A mistake is good once: it shows its perpetrator the error which they have committed; but if the error is repeated the teaching is lost to them. And every time a mistake is repeated it becomes more potent, till it gets a hold of the mind, and becomes a habit which is hard to kill.
"Therefore you must think & work with intelligence, and apply it to persistence: and when they try to make you think that the only way is to seat & suffer, and sweat & suffer again, and make the same mistakes over & over again till you don't make them anymore, remember this - that there is another secret way to go faster and learn better. Remember this, and you will never more be discouraged."
- The Living Dancer
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