Persisting means continuing to perform an action even though there are challenges, difficulties, and opposition. Persevering means continuing to take action over the long term even when it doesn’t look like there’s going to be success. Another way to think of it is: persistence helps you with short-term patience and consistency and perseverance helps you with long-term patience and consistency. 

This is really challenging to do when nothing in your environment supports your internal vision. You may make an effort and wind up failing in a way that is visible and affects others. You may look crazy to others and lose opportunities or the good opinion of others. You may notice that people you thought were in your corner are not. When this happens, it’s important to stay focused on the long-term goal and your good intentions. 

One framework that can help you do this is the WOOP Framework. WOOP stands for Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, and Plan. This framework is a response to the positive thinking approach to accomplishing goals. Research has found that when people only rely on positive thinking to achieve a goal, such as recovering from an injury, landing a dream job, or finding a romantic partner, they have less success than when they balance positive thinking with a realistic awareness of the obstacles in their way. 

WOOP proposes combining the good feelings that come with envisioning the outcome you want with additional steps that help you avoid sapping your energy. 

These steps include acknowledging the obstacles that you might face and creating a plan to overcome these obstacles. These obstacles can be internal (doubting thoughts, strong emotions, lack of motivation) or they can be external (lack of money, lack of market support, lack of societal support). You start by: 

• Specifying a wish: To sell one copy of The Magnetized Man through Adaptability Skill of the Month campaign
• Specifying the best outcome: To feel like my efforts have been worthwhile
• Specifying the obstacles: Worrying that people will not believe that the cost of the book was worth its contents
• Forming a plan: Reading positive reviews/Finding one person that I can cold email/Finding one thing to post on social media

It can be incredibly hard to take small actions towards a big goal. It’s easy to think, “How can this small effort make a difference?” But effort compounds. Each time you put in the work, you’re taking everything about you – your fear, your doubt, your uncertainty – and applying it to a task. Each time you see a little progress or even the smallest tangible outcome, you get a new measure of what you’re capable of accomplishing exactly as you are. So the next task becomes less overwhelming. Not because you have fewer doubts and difficult feelings, but because they don’t have as much power as they used to.