Perseverance

A lot of times what actually causes failure comes down to two items, resources and perseverance. Very few worthwhile endeavors have an interrupted path to success. Along the way the main enemies are lack of resources and lack of perseverance.

Getting sufficient resources may itself be a matter of perseverance. Let's be realistic, the world is full of naysayers and it gets pretty easy to doubt yourself when a plan doesn't seem to be working. There is no real way to know if everything in a plan is going to work, and since the common belief is that most ventures fail, doubt will appear.

Of course some plans are doomed, and if the plan is based on faulty premises, no amount of resources or perseverance are going to help. However, many well considered and well executed plans do run into snags. You have to believe in the plan in order to persevere. When you go over something in your head again and again, and you still come up with a workable set of circumstances, you need to keep going.

For those who remember their history, we have the example of Admiral Farragut. He is the Civil War Admiral who is famous for responding to someone who questioned his attack plan with the phrase, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead". Now, in some ways this may seem like a dangerous course of action, but it worked because he knew that the torpedoes at best would cause damage but not enough to stop the attack and conquest of Mobile. Had he waited, the torpedo situation wasn't going to get better and in fact, most likely it would have gotten worse.

Now, the Civil War is a great example of perseverance. There were numerous opportunities for the North to decide to stop. Clearly the early success of the Confederates could easily have led to the North deciding it just wasn't worth it. However, Lincoln persevered and eventually he found a General in Grant who also persevered.