They say a penny saved is a penny earned and that a stitch in time saves nine.  We all grow up hearing sayings like these, sayings that encapsulate folk wisdom into easily digested sound bites.  One should never count one’s chickens before they hatch, for example, or even put all of one’s eggs in the same basket lest it be dropped, breaking them all.

One of the most popular sayings is “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”  Persistence is so important to success that we are persistently reminded of this in many ways.  Rags to riches stories often feature a persistent hero, as do fairy tales and graduation speeches.

Thomas Edison, one of America’s greatest inventors, once said he hadn’t failed, he’d just found “10,000 ways that won’t work.”  Persistence was the hallmark of Edison’s worldview – he defined genius, for example, as “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” meaning that even the best idea isn’t worth anything without the hard work required to realize it.

And yet we are also told that “doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results” is the very definition of insanity and we often refer persistent people as being “OCD,” implying they suffer from an obsessive compulsive psychological disorder. Maybe that’s why the figure of the “mad scientist” and “mad composer” are such integral parts of our culture.  They refer to an individual so caught up in realizing his dreams that he becomes mentally unbalanced.

I thought about these opposing views of persistence recently while watching a movie called Rudy with my son Thomas.  Rudy is the true story of a not-too-talented, not-too-smart young man from a blue collar background whose dream was to play football for Notre Dame.  To realize his dream Rudy had to work harder than other students to get acceptable grades and, despite his best efforts, was only good enough to play on the team that runs other schools’ plays in practice so the first string can get an idea of what they’ll face.  Season after season Rudy got pummeled by larger, more talented players, with no hope of ever actually getting into a game.  Finally, though, the starters took pity on Rudy and forced their coach to put him in at the end of a game.

Rudy achieved his dream through his persistence, which gradually won him the respect of the rest of the team.  But he suffered terribly for a long time to reach that point, and though he graduated from a top college, all he really got for his football efforts was the grudging respect of his father and brother (though he presumably gained a lot of respect for himself).

I couldn’t help but wonder if Rudy was heroic or crazy, and finally decided he was both.  And I imagine there are a lot of people who, like Rudy, seem a bit crazy in their dedication to achieving their dreams.  I imagine there are also plenty of people happy to point this out to them (like Rudy’s family members in the movie).

Whether a persistent person is viewed as crazy or not probably depends on if he eventually succeeds.  That possibility suggests that successful people may seem a little bit crazy in their zeal to realize their dreams.  I can’t help but wonder if, like Rudy, we’d all be more successful if we’d pay less attention to the people who tell us what we can’t do and more time following our dreams…