One of the 24 character strengths
Finishing what you start. Staying with something through the part where it stops being interesting.
Perseverance is the strength of staying with something through the part where it stops being interesting. Almost everything worth doing has that part.
The beginning of a project is easy for nearly everybody. This strength is what operates in the middle third, where the novelty has gone, the end is not in sight, and nothing about the day argues for carrying on.
It is not the same as working hard. Somebody who leads here may work at a very ordinary pace and simply still be there in March, which turns out to matter more than intensity does.
That is also why it is easy to miss in somebody. Nothing about it is dramatic on any single day, and the whole of it only becomes visible in the finished thing.
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96 questions · about 9 min · free
Start your free assessmentWeek nine of a twelve-week thing. Nobody has asked about it in a month and the interesting problems were all solved in week three. The work still happens on Tuesday.
The same grip holds on to things that deserve to be dropped. A role, a project or an arrangement can get held long past the point where the honest answer was to stop. Stopping registers as quitting rather than as a decision.
It gets confused with being stubborn, and from the outside on a bad day it is hard to tell them apart. The difference is what happens when the evidence changes: this strength can be argued out of a course of action, and stubbornness cannot.
Both are about holding to something after the wish to do it has gone. Self-Regulation is about resisting an impulse in the moment; Perseverance is about continuing over weeks.
Both keep somebody going. Zest supplies the energy at the start; Perseverance is what is left when that has run out.
Everybody has all 24 of these. A result puts them in order within one person, so a strength near the bottom of somebody's list is one they reach for less often rather than one they are missing.
That also means nothing here compares one person with another. There is no reference sample behind these scales, and an order made of somebody's own answers cannot say where they stand next to anybody.
Or start with what the 24 character strengths are.
Two hundred and thirteen questions, about twenty minutes. You get all 24 put in your own order, free, with the ones that lead in you named at the top.
96 questions · about 9 min · free
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