Do you have a goal? Are you worried that you’ll never be able to achieve it? Do you wonder if you’ll ever get it done?

Are you interested in something but don’t know how to move forward with it? Do you think that if you’re not “good” at something that you can’t do it?

Are you stuck thinking that you’re not “good” at anything?

You don’t need talent. You don’t need aptitude. Talent and aptitude are only convenient head starts in achieving your goal.

What you need is desire and one thing; consistency.

I first learned this concept from my Grandmother, Verla Ball. She was born in 1915 and passed in 2009. Age 96. She lived through wars, marriages, deaths, business failures, heartbreak, fires, and so much more.

She and my Grandpa were focused on building a successful life together and making money. They wanted to be on “easy street” as they put it. She had seen a lot of failure and a lot of success on her journey.

She told me many times that the most important thing was to never give up. To keep going. It sounded true at the time but I didn’t have any experience. And like most young people I thought all you had to do was to follow what you were good at.

But I didn’t really understand what she meant.

She’d say, “if you just keep going, and never give up it’ll work out,” and, “the most important thing is to never quit,” or, “the secret is to keep going.”

I didn’t understand what she meant at the time.

Now I completely understand what she meant.

In any endeavor the only way to truly fail is to quit. Once you quit its over. It ends. Consider this story about how I quit and still regret it.

My brothers and I started an internet marketing company in 2014. We hired sales reps to go to local businesses and sell websites, SEO and social media marketing. We built up a team to produce the websites and stuff. It was going well until our sales slowed down. We started losing money. We got nervous and quit the business. We closed it down over a 6-month period.

If we had just trimmed down the business to the basic essentials and continued to work with our customers and teams, we could have saved that business. In fact, now that it’s been over 10 years, it would be very successful.

I think about that decision all the time. We worked so hard to get it started. But we quit when the going got tough. I regret that.

I can’t think of anything that can’t be improved with consistent effort. I recently wrote about the power of journaling. If you write in a journal every day for a year, you’ll see benefits. Imagine journaling for 25 years. Now, that’s something

If you hadn’t quit piano lessons you’d be a great piano player. Imagine how much skill you’d have if you practiced playing the piano 30 minutes a day for 10 years. You’d be amazing.

If you kept writing you would have finished your book by now. If you’re trying to finish a book, you’ve got to work through the painful rewrites and edits. Even if it took you an entire year to write a book you could write 10 books in 10 years. That’s significant.

Do you want to get in shape? Work out 3 times a week for a year. You’ll see results. Now do that for the rest of your life. You don’t even need to work out that hard. Just consistently.

Even if you experience significant amounts of failure on your journey, quitting is the only way to actually fail.

Getting up from failure, dusting yourself off, and going forward is how you win.