“When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this – you haven’t.” Thomas A. Edison

The old story goes that Edison tried 1,000 versions of the light bulb before he got one to work. He said he never regarded the experiments a failure. “I didn’t fail” he said. “I just found 999 things that didn’t work.”

Based on Edison’s quote, there are rewards for those who keep trying when others would quit.

There are lots of reasons why one quits:

We quit when we are physically tired.

We quit when we are mentally tired.

We quit when we don’t care.

We quit when something else distracts us.

We quit when we don’t see the big picture.

We quit when we don’t see the value of trying again.

But, Edison challenges us to be honest. Quitting is a choice that we have. We don’t quit because there was no other option. We quit because we wanted to do so.

He suggests that many of us make that choice before we need to do so. There may be more juice if we try one more time.

Having an attitude that you will be known to try harder than the next person has a winning strategy. Think about it: How many people do you know who have failed because they tried to hard?

Effort. Trying one more time. Being creative when there seem to be few options. We all could do that a bit more.