When Sir Winston Churchill was asked to address the students at Oxford University this was what he said: "Never give up! Never, ever, ever give up!" After that he walked of the stage. That was his speech. Perseverance is perhaps the single most important ingredient in the recipe for success, it doesn't matter what you want to accomplish.

Sir Winston Churchill should know that it takes a lot of persistence to succeed in life. His father thought he was retarded because he usually finished near the bottom of his class. It took him three years getting through eighth grade. He was rejected by both Oxford and Cambridge and was then advised by his father to follow a career in the Army. He failed the Royal Military College's entrance examination twice and finally succeeded the third time round.

This seemed to have been the case with more famous, successful people than you can imagine. Thomas Edison was told by his teacher that he was too stupid to learn anything and encouraged to take up a career where he might succeed by virtue of his pleasant personality. Albert Einstein was four years old before he started speaking, he did not read until he was seven. Most people who knew him believed that Einstein would never succeed at anything. Beethoven's music teacher said of him: "As a composer, he is hopeless". Elvis Presley was fired by his manager after various failed performances with very poor ticket sales. His manager told him: "You ain't goin' nowhere son. You ought to go back to drivin' a truck." He kept going and has more than one hundred Top 40 hits to his credit and ninety-seven gold albums, fifty-five of which went platinum, and twenty-five multiplatinum. Even today Presley remains the best-selling solo artist in popular music history. Michael Jordan's high school teacher said to him: "You will never become a famous basketball player, you don't have enough talent". J K Rowling's first Harry Potter book was rejected by eight agents, one of them said: "You'll never make money out of children's books."

These people and many others have had to face many rejections, tough times, failures, difficulties and disappointments before they finally succeeded. All of them have one thing in common, they never gave up, they believed in themselves and persevered no matter what.Perseverance makes the difference. It is the difference between giving up and breaking through.

Here are a few suggestions to turn persistence into a life-changing habit:
1) Develop staying power

Persistence is a unique mental strength that must be developed within. It is a character trait that very few people are born with. Perseverance is the ability to withstand the fierce power of repeated rejections and numerous obstacles and failures. These things are part of life.

According to Bob Proctor, if you could choose just one part of your personality and character to develop that would virtually guarantee you success, you should place persistence at the top of your list.The world is full of very talented people who will never make it because talent is not a substitute for staying power.

Those who are really successful at whatever they accomplish have developed the determination inside themselves to keep going, recover from a setback, make the necessary adaptations and keep on pushing harder.It is the ability to land on your back when life knocks you down, because as Les Brown likes to say: "If life knocks you down, try landing on your back, because if you are lying on your back, you can look up, and if you can look up, you can get up!

"2) Have a big enough why.

If you really want to persist in spite of repeated rejections and numerous obstacles and failures, you must want something bad enough, otherwise you will quit. You have to want something so much that it becomes a desire, a passion inside you.

You have to know exactly why you want it; you have to know that the course is worthwhile, that it is worth fighting for even if it costs you everything you have. The why must be big enough to be willing to pay the price.If you do not have the ability to persevere it is normally because you do not have a goal that is worthy enough, a goal that ignites a fire inside you and excites you to the core of your being.Life will test whether you really want something bad enough. Randy Pausch in his book The Last Lecture explained it best: "The brick walls are there for a reason. They're not there to keep us out. They're there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something". Do you have a big enough why?

3) Find ways to motivate yourself every day.

The only way to keep on in spite of setbacks and disappointments is to stay motivated. You must motivate yourself. You cannot wait for someone to come and motivate you with an inspirational story or message, what if that "someone" never arrives? You have to learn to motivate yourself. Motivation is like having a bath in order to stay clean, it doesn't last, you have to do it again tomorrow and every day until you accomplish your goal. Some people stay motivated for 30 minutes, some for 30 days and some for 30 years, that is the big difference.

If you want to develop the tenacity to persist day on and day out until you achieve what you've set out to do, you have to find a way to motivate yourself, read a book on what you want to accomplish, read a biography about someone who have already achieved it. Remind yourself again and again about why you want this so badly.

Finally, make a choice to reject any suggestion from friends, family or anybody, to quit. There is no doubt that after seeing you suffer through setbacks and rejections and mistakes some people with good intentions who really care for you will try and convince you to settle for something else. Arnold Schwarzenegger's family in their plea to get him a 'real' job asked him: "How long will you go on training all day in a gymnasium and living in a dream world?" But you must make a choice that you will never ever ever give up!