MIND MOVES: To believe that some goals can be achieved and to "hang in there" against all the odds until, eventually, you succeed, is a quality of human nature which touches and inspires us.
It is a key human strength that is fundamental to mental health. It reflects the ability to stand firm against the rockslides of an uncertain world, to maintain effort in the face of adversity, to persevere as you turn the dreams of your imagination into reality.
Setting goals for yourself is one of the ways you give structure and form to your life. Selecting goals and committing to them deserves a serious consideration.
You have limited time, energy and resources. You can't do everything equally well; you have to figure out what particular goals are important to you and let go other attractive possibilities.
Some of the goals we set ourselves daily are very concrete and basic: we continually construct to-do lists which can range from posting a letter, sorting out our finances, responding to a phone call, to pursuing an ongoing project that is of importance to us.
We can generally let go of goals that are pretty mundane and don't matter too much. But it's much harder to walk away from goals that represent what we value most, those projects that hold particular personal meaning for us.
To abandon a goal that is important to us, and one which we continue to consider important to us, long after we've abandoned it, can be a recipe for endless regret and distress.
So what helps us to persevere at any endeavour?
Two factors are critical: A goal needs to matter to us and we need to believe that we have what it takes to achieve it.
The more a goal matters to us, and the more we believe that it is attainable, the greater will be our commitment to it.
People don't persist at goals that don't matter to them.
And their persistence also breaks down because they lose faith in their ability to achieve what matters.
As they falter in their pursuit of a dream, they may become besieged with many different voices - from within and outside - which urge them to give up, to abandon their dream and settle for much less.
It's a curious quirk of human nature that the dreams that matter most to us are often those which people around find hardest to appreciate.
It's as though if you are going to do anything significant in your life, one way to judge whether you're on the right path, is to listen to the immediate reactions of those around you.
If they consider what you're contemplating to be foolish, it may well be you're on the right track.
When people do succeed in achieving some valued objective, it is very often the case that they can pinpoint the specific moment when their effort was poised on a knife edge, when they were ready to throw in the towel, but didn't.
Generally they will identify one person who helped them to re-engage with their dream, someone who believed in them and re-ignited their self-confidence.
For many of us, success or failure turns on the good fortune of meeting someone at a critical juncture of our lives who believed in us and didn't let us off the hook.
Although perseverance and the achievement of success is an important and praiseworthy human strength, it is not the whole story. And it would be wrong to leave you with only this partial truth.
Strength is not entirely about victory. Another equally important strength is being able to let go, being able to see the writing on the wall and to accept that to persist in attempting to achieve some valued goal is no longer wise or prudent.
Human strength is also about being overcome, and how we deal with that letting go of some valued goal.
In any given situation, the correct way forward can be hard to discern. To persevere may turn out to be glorious stupidity. To give up may turn out to be tragic loss.
The well-known serenity prayer asks for "the wisdom to know the difference" between these two courses of action.
To get it right, you may indeed need to call on whatever divinity, higher power, life experience or wise counsel to which you have access. But even then, when it comes down to it, you may find yourself alone. And it can be a hard call.
