http://stephenpierceinc.com/about-me/ Welcome to this edition of The Success Sculpting Coach featuring “How To Never Give Up: Hope Doesn’t Abandon Us, We Abandon Hope,” and how to build levels of persistence and perseverance to stay in a winning game.

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How To Never
Give Up
Hope Doesn’t Abandon Us, We
Abandon Hope – Here’s How To
Never Never Never Give Up
By Stephen Pierce
© Copyright
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains
material protected under International and Federal
Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized
reprint or use of this material is prohibited except
as permitted by the author.

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Table of Contents
Endurance is Everything..................................... 4
Internal and External Processes ......................... 8
The Proper Perspective ..................................... 12
Realistic Expectations ........................................ 14
Have a Contingency Plan ................................. 18
Summary ............................................................. 25

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Welcome to this edition of The Success Sculpting
Coach featuring “How To Never Give Up: Hope
Doesn’t Abandon Us, We Abandon Hope,” and
how to build levels of persistence and perseverance
to stay in a winning game.
Endurance is Everything
You can have all kinds of skills, a world of
opportunities and great potential, but if you can’t
endure and stay in the game long enough to give
yourself the opportunity to win, then winning is
unlikely.
There is no success without perseverance and
persistence. But how do you tap into that level of
intestinal fortitude, that stick-to-itiveness, when it
seems that life is sticking it to you?
How do you maintain that unstoppable level of
resilience, that perpetual bounce-back, no matter
how many times you fall down?

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Successful people don’t count how many times
they fall down; they count how many times they
actually get back up. That’s what perseverance and
persistence is all about.
It’s not just participating in the game, but about
persisting in the game. It’s not just starting the task,
but continuing and completing the task and seeing
it all the way through.
Success isn’t about having a wishbone – it’s about
having a backbone.
That backbone allows you to persevere and persist
even when you’re standing alone; when everyone
who started with you is gone; when all the plans
you carefully laid out basically fall apart and all
you have left is that burning flame of hope,
knowing that you can achieve what you want to
achieve and that you just need to endure.

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You need to hold on. You need to persist. You need
to never give up.
How often have you been tired of endless
“preparing” and thought of quitting?
You go through the process of doing this, that and
the other based on what you’re told, and certain
things are supposed to show up in your life.
“These certain things are supposed to happen and
they’re not happening. I’m tired of this. I’m tired of
practicing.”
How many times have you taken your eye off the
ball or the objective to get better because you felt
disoriented and wanted to quit, that what you were
doing didn’t really matter in the big picture?
There’s nothing wrong with feeling like quitting,
thinking or even talking about quitting, “That’s it,

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I’m done, I quit!” as long as you don’t actually do
it.
The big error is when you allow those feelings to
override your commitment.
Endurance, perseverance and persistence qualify
you for the reward.
You're able to endure, persevere and persist when
you have a picture of what you want to create.
When everything gets blurry, you get distracted,
become depressed, disoriented and dismayed. You
just get dis’d. The final dis is when you want to
dismiss yourself from the entire process, because it
seems like an endless recurrence of the same
negative situations over and over.

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Internal and External Processes
There is a tendency to think about performance and
processes as external, but internal (mental)
processes precede and even trump external
performances.
How people perform from an internal (mental)
perspective impacts how they actually perform
externally (physically). The question is, “How are
you performing from a mental standpoint?”
You can physically see when someone is being
persistent. You can’t touch or smell persistence, but
you can recognize what intestinal fortitude looks
like.
It shows in a person’s performance; it drives them
to action.

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It’s hard, however, to persist and persevere in the
face of great obstacles if there is a lack of alignment
among the spirit, body, and soul.
Consider the mindset behind Special Opporation
Forces, like Navy Seals, Army Rangers, and Sniper
teams.
The process to become a Special Forces member is
designed to disqualify members, not qualify them.
It is training engineered to make them quit.
Why?
These groups need people to be in dark, obscure
places where, no matter what comes their way,
they will never give up.
So, everything is thrown at these candidates to
make them quit.

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Think about it; 250 guys enter training saying, “I’m
going to be a Navy Seal.”
And at the end of the day, about 20 or 30 are left
when the others start ringing the bell that indicates,
“I quit.” The difference is not physical.
Training information indicates that the soldier’s
physical body is the first to succumb to training
challenges.
Those who become part of any Special Ops Team
are the ones with the mental toughness to
overcome the physical pain.
Like an old warrior, his spirit is fearless, yet the
body trembles when it experiences levels of anxiety
and pain.
Fearlessness occurs at the spiritual level, where
there’s an unwavering commitment to do whatever

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is necessary to succeed, regardless of physical pain
or anxiety.
The process of becoming successful is about
snatching what you want from obstacles in your
path.
It’s like trying to figure a way to disarm a bear trap
without tripping the trap on your hand. Life is an
obstacle course, and how well you do is based on
how successfully you can navigate obstacles.
If your perspective is that they shouldn’t exist, then
you will be in shock when they appear. Obstacles
aren’t necessarily the problem.
It’s how you negotiate around or through them that
matters.

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The Proper Perspective
Professional athletes enter training camps to
prepare to overcome and win games versus teams
that also prepare to win.
They know that winning is only found by beating
someone else who is equally prepared to beat them.
What happens when you use that same strategy?
What if you think winning will not be easy,
convenient or affordable in time, energy or money,
but you want it to be worth it?
Are you prepared to persevere and persist, or does
your lack of preparation set you up to be pounced
on the moment something doesn’t go your way?
Often, your plans fail to work because resistance is
all around you. There’s nothing you can do to

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control resistance, but you can prepare to overcome
it. That’s known as simply personal responsibility.
Your response to resistance must be according to
the situation and not according to how you feel.
It may be emotionally gratifying in the short term,
but it doesn’t last in the long term.
It’s like eating a chocolate cake in the moment, but
later paying for it with love handles or bad health.
Do you respond to situations emotionally, or from
a more intellectual and thoughtful standpoint?
Do you think before you actually respond, as
opposed to emotional rapid reactions?
Most quick reactions are based on what you feel in
the moment.

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Many people are slaves to what they feel, and then
find themselves trying to clean up a mess because
they allowed their feelings “in the moment” to
deceive them.
You don’t have to be a victim of deception, either
your own or someone else’s.
You can shake off negative feelings with positive
reactions. Instead of thinking in hindsight, “I
would have done it differently,” imagine, “What
would happen if I do this?”
There is no question that emotions are extremely
powerful, which is why you need to tame them
(active approach) and not be tamed by them
(passive approach).
Realistic Expectations
Winning positions are built over time, not
overnight. It’s about your expectations.

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Suppose you like gardening and see other people’s
beautiful fields of vegetables and fruits, and think,
“I’m going to do that!” So you get more involved in
gardening.
Then you hear some people complain that they
don’t have a garden, but they neglect to tell you
that they planted nothing.
They expect to reap the rewards for something
when they made no investment in anything.
Then there are gardeners who complain about
what they do have. “Why in the world do I have
these strawberries?”
They wanted watermelons but got strawberries.
The obvious question is, “What did you put into
the ground?
Did you plant watermelon seeds or strawberry
seeds?” And then there are those who plant seeds

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in the garden today and ask tomorrow, “Where’s
my garden?” Even a Chia Pet takes time!
What are your expectations?
Are you disoriented about them? Do you expect
that what you want to happen can happen faster
than the natural process dictates?
Proper orientation is a prelude to perseverance and
persistence. For example, the human pregnancy
process is generally nine months; it’s a fact of
nature.
No one would ever think that a woman can be
pregnant and deliver a healthy, full-term baby in
three months. It’s just not feasible.
You can apply this same principle to weight loss
programs or to building that business you’ve
always wanted.

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Whatever your goals may be, your expectations of
what it will take in terms of time, energy and
money might be mismatched with reality.
Every sports team knows it takes X number of
games over X number of months to get to (and
win!) the championship round.
They won’t bail out in mid-season, thinking, “Man,
this is taking too long!”
No way.
They know how long it will take and what they
must do to get there.
Remember, the quantity, quality and focus of
behaviors depends on expectations and timelines,
and it all can come crumbling down if you rely on
improper orientations of how long parts of the
process will take.

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If you want to succeed at something you’ve never
done before and put unrealistic timelines on your
goals, then if those goals don’t happen within those
timelines, you’re likely to give up at this point.
Have a Contingency Plan
Most people have an original plan, but not a
contingency plan. A contingency plan kicks into
gear when something goes wrong.
Some people fail to develop a contingency plan
because they see it as too negative. “Well, what if
this doesn’t work?”
Sometimes the positive and negative aspects of
truth about a situation collide.
But truth has no bias as being negative or positive.
It’s simply the truth.

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You can color it, dress it up, spray it with perfume
and still call it negative or positive.
It’s simply the truth, the facts.
Guess what my friend. Ignoring the facts doesn’t
change the facts.
That's your biased attitude.
Sometimes you are blind to a truth that might help
you, because it’s packaged as something you
perceive as negative.
The truth is that your original plan has a high
probability of not working. That’s not a negative.
That’s truth. So have a contingency plan.
It’s like a quarterback at the line of scrimmage
changing a play from what he called in the huddle
(an audible) because he sees a better play option.

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In life and in business, if you fail to give yourself
options to change as the environment changes, you
become extinct.
Blockbusters suffered at the hands of Redbox and
Netflix because it didn’t adapt.
Why is the music industry a servant to iTunes,
Napster, Rhapsody, and all those other companies?
It was so fixated on what was that it was blind to
what could be. And it didn’t change.
Amazon didn’t create book buying; it wasn’t even
the first online bookstore. But it did have the best
model and recently represents over 80% of all
online book buying.
In the 2000’s decade, when many tech companies
had outrageous valuations and went bust, Amazon
lost millions of dollars every year for over five
years.

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But it understood that success happens over time,
not overnight.
It endured, knowing that it takes intestinal
fortitude, perseverance and persistence to bounce
back.
Plenty of critics wrote them off, but Amazon didn’t
buy into that option. Instead, they mastered their
processes and excelled at them.
Who is writing you off.
Go ahead and let them waste their ink, paper and
time.
I tell people, listen, “if you want to write me off, go
ahead, but you better write it in pencil and have your
eraser ready.”

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At the end of the day, if you don’t write yourself
off, then it doesn’t matter what is coming out at the
end of other people’s pens, pencils and tongues.
When someone wants to write you off, ask
yourself, “where did they learn to write you or
anyone off?”
Chances are it started with them writing
themselves off, and like all socialites, they are
looking for company.
Don’t join them.
If they want to bet against you winning and
succeed. It’s their money to lose.
I’ll take a bet against me any day, because no one’s
money is longer than my lion like attitude and
relentless determination and willingness to screw
everything up to figure out how to get it right.

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Never bet against a hungry determined person
with nothing to lose.
Now, on the subject of what you “think” you have
to lose, I’ll save that for another time. 😊
At some point in life, most people think about what
they would like to enjoy, but very few talk about
what they must endure to enjoy it.
Persistence has its price and success comes with a
price. Some people become so fixated about it all
that they quit.
The price gets too high in time, money, energy, or
whatever sacrifice they imagine.
What are you willing to endure to enjoy what you
want?
How often do you take time to think about the cost
of success?

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It has a price, and persistence and perseverance are
parts of that price.
Quitting also has a cost.
What will it cost you if you quit? What will it cost
your family, and the people you say you love?
What will it cost those people who will be
negatively impacted because you decided to quit,
because you decided to allow life’s resistance to
outlast your personal persistence?
What will it cost your destiny, your legacy, your
future?
Will you pay the cost of quitting or the price of
winning?
Persistence has benefits, quitting has consequences.

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Since you will pay for something, you might as
well pay for the positive, for winning, no matter
what that price is, if it’s legal, ethical, and morally
correct.
There are no limits to your commitment when you
truly want a specific goal.
There will be temptations to give up. But being
tempted is not an error.
The error is when you yield to temptation and
allow those moments of pressure to get the best of
you, and then just fold.
Summary
Keep your destiny front and center in your mind,
because that becomes your beacon of hope.
When you feel like packing it all in and abandoning
your hopes and dreams, remain persistent and

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persevere toward your goals, understanding that:
“This is a price I must pay, and the reward far
outweighs the cost of quitting. I will never give
up.”
May The Most High Bless YOU and YOURS,
Stephen Pierce
www.SuccessSculpting.com