“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.” -Winston Churchill

The Story of the Chinese Bamboo
The Chinese plant the seed. They water and fertilize it, but the first year nothing happens. The second year they water and fertilize it, and still nothing happens. The third and fourth years they water and fertilize it, with no    apparent results, and sometime during the course of the fifth year, in a period of six weeks, the bamboo tree grows roughly ninety feet.

The question is, did it grow ninety feet in six weeks or did it grow ninety feet in five years? The obvious answer is that it grew ninety feet in five years because if had they not applied the water and fertilizer each year, there would be no Chinese bamboo tree. All of us have had those “Chinese Bamboo Tree” experiences. We might have had a difficult assignment in math, social studies or science. We had to work at it again and again without coming up with the correct answer. Once we did finally get the answer it seemed simple and obvious. We came up with the answer not because of our intellectual brilliance but because of our perseverance.