Life is full of difficult times…If you fill your days with pity, sorrowful for the way you have been treated, bemoaning your lot in life, blaming your circumstances on someone or something else, then life will be long and hard. If, on the other hand, you refuse to give up on your dreams, stand tall and strong against the odds—then life will be what you make of it—and you can make it great.
Never, ever, ring the bell!
Admiral William H. McRaven, Make Your Bed, p. 47.
The bell to which Admiral McRaven refers is a bell at Navy SEAL training. As hopeful SEALs go through the torturous “Hell Week,” the bell is ever-present. All you have to do is quit, ring the bell, and the pain stops. As Admiral McRaven puts it in his book, “Ring the bell and you won’t have to get up early. Ring the bell and you won’t have to do the long runs, the cold swims, or the obstacle course. Ring the bell and you can avoid all this pain” (p. 46).
But, as he states in his viral college commencement address:
If you want to change the world, don’t ever, ever ring the bell.
As expats, there are a thousand and one things that will make us want to quit. What enables you to survive and thrive isn’t tips to eliminate hassles of expat life, though that will help. It’s not training on language methodologies or cross-cultural communication, though that won’t hurt.
No, what enables you to survive and thrive is character. It’s grit. Perseverance. Willpower. Toughness. Commitment. Tenacity.
Don’t ring the bell.
That’s easier said than done, so today’s article is going to show you the crucial two steps you need to be able to persevere.
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The need for perseverance
I don’t have to tell you that being an expat is hard. And I won’t sport with your intelligence by naming all the ways here. You know what they are if you’ve lived overseas for more than two weeks. You know the pains of growing into a new world, language, and culture. You’ve experienced the dying of your competent self in your passport country and becoming a baby in the new world. You’ve had to re-learn how to be an adult. You’ve experienced the heartache of missed weddings, grieving deaths alone, and absent family.
There are a thousand pains and sufferings that may cause you to quit. There are constant pressures that will make you want to pack up your bags, throw in the towel, and call it a day.
So, how do you keep going? How do you not ring the bell when everyone else is and when there’s every reason to do it?
Perseverance.
Tenacious perseverance will keep you moving forward when others will quit.
Why “not quitting” isn’t enough
A lot of articles written on perseverance are inspiring and help create the motivation in us to never quit. I love those. As I write this, I’ve listened to several motivation speeches on never quitting, like those by Winston Churchill or Admiral McRaven or Obama.
Yet, if all you do is “get inspired” from a speech or examples of other people’s perseverance, you’ll quit when you encounter challenges yourself.
Why?
Because perseverance, by itself, looks a lot like stupidity.
Merriam-Webster defines perseverance as “continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition.”
Perseverance is continued effort when it’s hard. It’s doing something even when there are obstacles, when there is pain, when nothing seems to change, when failure seems certain.
And stupidity is doing the same thing. If you spend every ounce of your strength and your dying breath trying to push over the Empire State Building, that’s not perseverance. That’s stupidity.
Perseverance can look a lot like stupidity.
See, perseverance isn’t merely “not quitting,” though that’s how we often think of it. Perseverance is not quitting in pursuit of a worthy goal. If the goal isn’t worthy, the perseverance in the face of pain isn’t admirable, it’s just stupid.
What’s your goal?
If you want to survive and thrive as an expat, in language learning, or in anything else in life, you must have a goal that is worth the sacrifice. You must have a why that is more powerful than the pain. You must have a reason to endure suffering that enables you to keep going.
So, what’s yours?
See, If you’re doing something that just doesn’t matter and you face hardship, you’ll want to quit. And you probably should. Don’t suffer for something that’s not worth it.
If your reason is just about you, having a better or more convenient life, or just making money, then the moment you start to experience a worse life due to perseverance, you’ll quit. And you probably should.
But if your why is about making the world a better place, that’s something different entirely.
A big others-centered goal is worthy of your perseverance.
So, why are you an expat? Why are you learning a language? Is it big enough to deserve your sacrifice and perseverance?
I know expats who have goals like these, and I can’t help but admire them for their worthiness:
- Bringing clean water to people and preventing millions of deaths due to unclear water
- Doing community development work so that people thrive and grow
- Building sustainable agriculture and training others to do the same
- Developing a business that serves people while also creating jobs and eliminating poverty
- Enabling others to improve their lives by learning a new language
- Saving lives through medical work and training
- Escaping poverty and crime in one country so your children have a better future in another
These are worth persevering for. Notice that every single goal is about serving others. Self-centered goals don’t create perseverance because future pleasure for yourself can easily be overwhelmed by present pain. Persevering in a self-centered goal quickly looks like stupidity. It’s just not worth the sacrifice.
Other-centered goals, though, are worth sacrificing for. Making the world a better place is a worthy goal. And if that’s your goal, perseverance makes sense. You won’t grow weary of doing good, for the good is worth your sacrifice. With a worthy goal, perseverance is noble and admirable, a character trait to emulate.
So, why are you an expat? How are you serving others or making the world a better place by being one? Get this crystal clear in your mind—and write it down. Put it in a place where you’ll see it and remember it.
Developing your perseverance
A worthy goal is the most important part of learning to persevere. People who have a worthy goal still quit, though, so that alone is not enough. Part of the answer is learning perseverance of the moment. I wrote an entire article on that, so I won’t repeat it now.
But you need to go beyond that. You have to develop your ability to persevere before you need to exercise that ability. If you haven’t learned to persevere through small challenges, you won’t be able to persevere through a big challenge, no matter how worthy your goal is.
So, when you don’t need to persevere, when everything is good, when you’re not facing challenges or obstacles—those are the times you need to persevere.
What comes out in your darkest hour is what you’ve put into your heart when times are good.
Gordon McDonald, Ordering Your Private World.
However, the ability to persevere cannot be developed without challenges. In order to exercise and develop perseverance, you have to hit difficulties, obstacles, or challenges and learn to endure despite them.
So if you’re not facing significant challenges requiring perseverance right now, you’re not growing your ability to persevere. You’ll need to create some discomfort in your life so that you can learn to persevere. I’m not talking about masochism here, I’m talking about doing things intentionally because they’re harder than not so that you can grow.
Do something every day for no other reason than you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and untrained to stand the test.
William James, Habit.
What small challenges can you add into your day that will train your perseverance so that, when you need a lot of perseverance, you’ll be ready? I’ll leave a couple of ideas in the comments that I and others do, but please add your own to the comments or after this post wherever you saw it on social media!
Persevering together
Another critical part of your ability to persevere–and something I actually missed in the original article!–is your community around you. If you’re persevering through challenges by yourself, it will be a tough road. You can do it, but there is no one to help you when you’re weak.
If you have a supportive community, though, you can endure far more than if you’re by yourself. I still remember one time when I was dead-tired (new baby) and didn’t want to go to my language session at all. Yet, my friend and I were going to sessions together, and so I did. My personal perseverance wasn’t good enough to keep learning, but because I was doing it with a friend, I stuck it out.
The funny thing was, when I arrived, I learned that he didn’t want to come either. He only came because he knew I would be there and so he stuck it out.
In that moment, neither of us had the internal perseverance to keep learning. Had it been just me, or just him, we would’ve canceled class that day. But because we were in it together, we had perseverance in the community that we didn’t have in ourselves.
Just make sure it’s a positive, supportive community that supports you in your goals. Nothing will sap your perseverance faster than being surrounded by naysayers and detractors.
Conclusion
Being an expat will test the limit of your resolve. But with a worthy goal and a commitment to growing your perseverance, you can persevere and accomplish the good that you seek to do. As you live your life and inevitably encounter difficulties, remember that each challenge you face is an opportunity to build the character that will sustain you through even tougher days ahead.
Embrace discomfort. Be steadfast under trials and difficulties. Run with endurance the race marked out for you. Hold onto the vision of the impact you want to have on the world. Keep on with tenacious perseverance so that you’ll not only survive, but thrive.
If you want to change the world, never, ever ring the bell.
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Things I’ve seen people do for the specific purpose of building resilience amidst difficult things:
* Taking cold showers or doing ice baths
* Training for a 5k, half marathon, marathon, or Ironman
* Fasting
* Any kind of physical workout, consistently done
* Setting a goal to do something every day, no matter what (e.g. read 10 pages of a book, journal, etc.)
What else have you done to purposefully grown your ability to persevere?