By Roberta Schlehr

Perseverance is a word that I looked up, at a young age, maybe around grade 3. This word was used to describe me in an end-of-year memory book. Do you remember such a book? It was little book used to collect autographs of your friends and teachers, some would write a message. The crossing guard wrote in my little memory book, something about me having perseverance. Now in 3rd grade, I had no idea what that word meant. I actually looked it up and it has stuck with me ever since.

Perseverance always stuck with me. It means that I never give up! Perseverance is something that I think is in my core. I just draw on it — sometimes without even knowing. In a recent instance of this, in my college course at UMass. I had a project to do and it was not coming too easy. I was struggling on how to change the contents of a PowerPoint into an eLearning module. The info seemed too basic and just informational. I focused on my other classwork. The eLearning project was always swirling around in my head, contemplating how I would go about to make it interactive and interesting. As part of the final project there needed to be some kind of documentation, final product or paper describing the process and outcome. It would be ok if the project was a “non-success”, the paper would need to describe why it was not successful. I kept thinking I was going to take the non-success route, as the semester was coming to an end. I continued to do my other work. The eLearning project was always lurking in the background.

Finally, I sat down and I said “OK, I really have to make something of this project!”. After all, it is what I am going to school for and all type of work I am interested in. This is an Articulate Storyline project and I am fairly new to Storyline. I started with research to look at YouTube videos. This helped me to determine how I could break each slide down. Once I looked at the individual slides, and I started to think about the activity that could be used, the project was coming together. I incorporated hotspots, drag, and drop, click on the markers and pop-ups. I was surprised how many triggers and interactions I was able to apply.

The point of the story is to tell you — don’t give up, even if you think it’s a non-success! Don’t give up because somewhere deep down you’re going to be able to figure out how to make it a success. I hope that this story gives you more of a motivation to carry on, and not easily give up on something. There may be times that what you are working on is a non-success, and that is ok, as long as you tried and put in the effort. Use perseverance to work through the difficulties and you may surprise yourself to find the answer.

Is there a single word that gives you motivation?