Asked the reason for his success, Ivan Pavlov, on his deathbed, replied, “Passion with gradualism.” Living as we do in an age of instant gratification, this is a rare and priceless virtue which we all must cultivate. My Father modeled this the best of anyone I have personally known. He was a visionary and dreamed some impossible dreams, at least they seemed so to many. But we watched and often helped, as one by one his dreams materialized. Little matter that it took twenty years of slow, hard, manual labor to complete the swimming pool at the camp he built, he had a dream which he persistently, passionately, gradually pursued, till finally it was complete. Incidentally, we swam in it from the beginning — each year it just got better.
If it is a worthy dream and you want it badly enough to pay the price and passionately persist, it will almost surely come true. PASSION WITH GRADUALISM.
