Your World Within Podcast by Eddie Pinero
The Power of Persistence: Dance Until It Rains
Fri, 31 Jan 2025
Success isn’t about luck—it’s about persistence. Like a rain dance that works if you dance long enough, life rewards those who refuse to stop moving. The question isn’t whether the effort will pay off, but whether you’re willing to keep going until it does. Every step forward creates momentum, and as long as you’re moving, you’re still in the game. Failure only exists when you decide to stop. The truth is, the road to success is built on resilience, commitment, and the courage to keep dancing—especially when the rain feels far away. So, how long are you willing to dance? Because the rain will come, but only if you refuse to quit. Monday Motivation Newsletter: https://www.eddiepinero.com/newsletter Free Ebook: www.eddiepinero.com/ebook YouTube: www.eddiepinero.com/youtube
Chapter 1: What does persistence mean in life?
Rain dances work 100% of the time, if you dance until it rains. Someone kind of jokingly said this to me recently at an entrepreneur event, and I thought, man, I get it, it's clever, but there's actual genius behind that. You tend to get what you're looking for if you don't stop looking, right? Like you eventually arrive where you need to be if your feet don't stop moving.
The question we often find ourselves asking is, did the dance work? But the real question, the question of value, is how long are you willing to dance around that fire? How much of yourself did you put into the pursuit? You know, it's both liberating and terrifying to find out that there is no failure in life. There's simply the permission we give ourselves to move forward.
That trajectory we continue on up until we reach a point where we look around and say, no thank you, I'm done. Because if you're moving forward, you haven't failed. You have not lost. If you're moving forward, everything is possible. If you're moving forward, you are creating reality. The question is not have you failed? The question is, are you still willing to move forward?
It's not, did the rain dance bring the rain? It's, were you willing to dance around that fire until the skies opened up? I often think about the stoic idea that there are things we can control and there are things we can't. And knowing that difference is wisdom. The same idea that has become, as many people know, the serenity prayer. God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.
The courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference. It's certainly powerful to understand the difference between what we can control and what we can't. But it's also worth noting that those things we cannot control, even when they seem to make life harder...
when they're not what we want, when they're frustrating and difficult and exhausting, they can be brought into your world and leveraged as tools to ultimately get you where you need to go. Slingshot to something better, right? There's value in all of it.
And if you're looking at life through the lens of I'm not stopping until X happens, well, then everything that occurs around you is just a vehicle taking you closer to X. Put simply, you can't always control what happens. But you can always control what you do with what happens. And that's power. That is strength.
So using a tangible, practical example, right around the time COVID emerged in 2020, I was speaking about five or six times a month. I had video production clients, and my own personal content creation was relatively minimal. And so that hit to our way of life, the one we all endured, took a lot of companies' budgets, right?
That uncertainty prevented a lot of people from spending the marketing money they were spending. And on its face, it's a bad thing, right? It took a lot of business for me. But I look back now and I'm like, that pivot, you know, 10x'd, 20x'd my digital footprint. I was able to reach more people from my home studio. I adjusted, right?
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Chapter 2: How can you leverage adversity for growth?
Adversity has created more masterpieces, more miracles than calm ever could. Because it makes us step back and look at our creation in a new way. Remember, quitting is not something that the external world projects upon you. Quitting is looking around and saying, wow, this is a lot. This is more than I can handle. I'm done. This is the end. I don't want to walk into the storm.
I'm not interested in embracing the chaos. And I want to take a second to remind you that if you put your head down and just continuously step into it, if you can remind yourself, I didn't make this situation, but day by day I can make something valuable from it, you're making yourself powerful beyond measure.
It's not superhuman strength or some godly intellect that makes the difference at the end of the day. It's a willingness to understand, right, that if you do not stop, if you're willing to adjust and keep moving forward, you become invincible. There's a lot you can't control, but you can control what it all means and how you'll navigate it. That understanding is greatness.
So dance around that fire until the rain falls again. Because if you dance long enough, it surely will. The world, it needs you. But it needs the real you. Not the one with the mask looking to blend in. Nor the one making all those concessions to avoid being left out. No, the real you. With your flaws and your insufficiencies, Your strengths and your gifts, your hopes and your dreams.
It needs the you that so often hides away underneath that blanket of caution and skepticism. The you that's coupled with vulnerability. More easily ignored than brought to life with conviction. But that's the you this world needs. When I was younger, I seemed to separate life into two categories. Me in one, and everyone else in the other.
And guess which of the two categories I assumed had it all figured out. In my mind, I was the one, the only one, who didn't know. The one who was winging it, stumbling my way through each and every day. All those other people, though, They not only had plans, they had the right plans. They knew the right details, but I didn't. And so in my head, me being right required I necessarily look to them.
I follow their lead. Since there exists an established, correct path, that must be where I steer the ship. But then some time passes, you grow older, maybe pick up a little wisdom along the way, and you realize that no one really knows what they're doing. There are very few objectively correct roads that must be traveled. Life is not a paint by number, it's a blank canvas.
And understanding this changed the image in my head from one of me knocking on the door of a party everyone else was at to visualizing almost 8 billion individual souls running around trying to figure things out in the limited stretch of time they have here on planet Earth.
I realized I had at times felt small only because of the gravity I attributed to people who were just trying to figure it out themselves. And the point, certainly not to diminish anyone else's journey, it was to give myself permission to embark upon my own.
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Chapter 3: Why is self-leadership crucial for success?
Looking yourself in the mirror and saying, I am worth it, and there's more out there, means without question you are taking off the training wheels, dancing with vulnerability. But it also means when that time comes and you look back on how you lived your days, you can say, I truly lived. You can say that the world needed me. And I had the courage to heed its call.
And I had the courage to heed its call.
Ausgeruht sein? Ganz einfach. Trainiere deinen Schlaf und werde auch du zum Morgenmenschen. Mit der Galaxy Watch 7 oder dem Galaxy Ring und der Samsung Health App.
Sometimes I wonder, why? Why does this season of life feel like it's one undesirable outcome after another? What happened to the law of averages? When is the wind? Where is the light at the end of the tunnel? Why would I continue going in this direction? when it feels like that spot on the horizon I've been chasing has eluded me. Why? Why are my results not aligning with my output?
It's hard to wake up and do this. It takes all of me to give this much. Sometimes I wonder where is the delayed gratification everyone speaks of? Where's the fruit of my labor, the arm on my shoulder that says this is why it was all worth it? Why hasn't the payoff shown itself? Why? And why does it seem like every curveball materializes at the worst possible time?
Why won't my body cooperate now when I need it most? Why does my mind play with the worst case scenarios? Why does an already challenging path have to be more difficult than it is now? How many ways do I have to feel pain? Why does discomfort follow me around? Why won't life let me shake this? Why? Well maybe, just maybe, to show you how strong you are. What you can endure.
Because deep down in your soul, you know you are the 1%. Because if you can push through this, you can push through anything. And I don't know why life gives us its lessons when it does. why the world seems to stack it on when we're at our most vulnerable, when the ground beneath us is most unstable.
But if you can find the courage to step back and see this for what it is, if you can hold on to the idea that this is happening for you, you'll come out of this a different person. You don't need to perform a miracle when you're at your lowest. No, the courage, the power, the strength is in showing up. You need to continue forward. Let go of the week, the month, the year.
Sometimes we are tasked with pushing through the moment, the hour, surviving the day. And sometimes there is nothing more courageous than that, nothing more powerful than seeing what it turns into down the road when we look over our shoulders and are grateful we never stopped. So yes, this season might seem like a nonstop barrage of obstacles and misfortune. Why?
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Chapter 4: What role do small daily actions play in achieving goals?
Not feeling the need to share every detail with an audience or capture every second of what you're building behind the scenes. No, turn the cameras off, breathe, focus. Be private for at least a portion of your day. I think you'll find in that space this beautiful opportunity to reflect and build and step into an evolved version of yourself.
Don't be scared to disappear and come back better equipped. Don't be hesitant to go work on yourself. If you're talking substantive impact, true value add, it's always the people willing to put in the hours, to do the things that most people are not willing to do, target, identify the areas that make the difference, and then hammer those repeatedly. And look, I get it.
You have to, in a lot of cases, give up some of the now in order to reach an ambitious goal in the future. It's a trade-off. It's hard. But life is about trade-offs. And maybe this message isn't for everyone, but if you're listening to this and you want to achieve some semblance of excellence in a given area, it's inescapable. It means falling in love with a pursuit that's time intensive.
It means showing up and putting in the hours, often for little short-term validation. It means solitude. because getting better is more important than attention. One of my favorite quotes is, confidence is earned. Well, you earn that confidence by showing up and committing to the things that truly matter, that make you stronger.
The hard thing brought me through hell.
but also to that which exists on the other side. The hard thing prompted me to question and doubt, but also provided the pieces I used to build my confidence little by little. It made me ask the tough questions, the ones maybe I didn't want to hear the answer to, but also gave me the power to transform those answers I didn't like.
The hard thing meant forfeiting being the expert in my world in exchange for the role of student in a foreign arena. Gave me new ladders to climb, new possibilities to reach for. It showed that true growth requires a willingness to be the beginner.
It took some people out of my arms, my circle, my work, and in some cases my life altogether, but always seemed to open the door to those souls better aligned, those conducive to the journey and the process. Let's remember what the hard thing is. Beyond the pain, because we all know it does bring that. Beyond the challenges, because there are certainly many.
Beyond all that exists the hope and the change and the promise. Robert Frost says the best way out is always through. Through because it's the chaos, the haze, the darkness of night that shapes us. It's in being broken that we learn to rebuild our world with the pieces and perhaps most important,
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Chapter 5: How can you transform your mindset towards challenges?
Putting your shoes on, going for a walk or run, heading to the gym. Hey, procedurally, pretty easy. Not that complex. But talking yourself into just going tomorrow instead. Also a rationalization that's pretty easy. And that's essentially the question. Which easy are you going to go with? How do you put yourself in position to select the right easy?
Well, like so many things, it starts with the worldview and flows out to the tangible actions we take in support of that worldview. First things first, we have to know that the biggest advantage available is seeing the small things as so much more than small things.
It's refusing to fall victim to the disappointment and burnout associated with hoping for one huge jump, a miracle solution, the answer that will change everything. That's deceiving. Winning looks small and consistent. Progress is boring. It's mundane. It looks like deciding on what matters and then making a pact with yourself every day to keep your own promises.
When most would fall off or push things to tomorrow, it's seeing your commitment as everything. Knowing that the people who manufacture significance in their lives, they treat what others would call silly and trivial as life and death. They make the details into the whole storyline. So yeah, it might be easy for someone else to walk away.
But when you have given yourself no other option but to succeed, the little steps to make it happen requires zero thought or internal deliberation. The person who gets into shape over the course of six months They're not going to be the one who found a secret diet, bought a piece of equipment on Amazon.
They didn't do the necessary thing here and there when they had their fleeting moments of inspiration. No, they made better, consistent decisions. No to the soda. Yes to the water. No to the alarm. Yes to the run. No to the Netflix. And yes to the gym. Both options were easy in the moments in which they arose. but each time only one option mattered. And that's what it's about.
Tying the prolonged gratification to something that means the world to you, where each step is not just a step, but one step closer to the moon. So no, it's certainly not that a can of Coke or dessert or the day off will kill you. But flip the narrative. It's that when you do stay true to your mission and the promises you make to yourself, you get something so much more back.
It's not, oh, what will I lose by skipping this 1%? No, in a world where excellence compounds, it's look what I am becoming. And this decision is an investment too good to pass up. And every decision to move forward, to embrace the things that align with your true north, is a nod to that future self. Lead yourself first. Before we can influence,
before we can ever persuade or change anything externally, we have to first lead ourselves. And that means delivering on the promises we make to ourselves. It means showing up when we tell ourselves we're going to show up. It means putting ourselves in an environment conducive to growth.
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Chapter 6: What is the importance of being your own ally?
But don't be afraid to look over your shoulder and see that you already are. Don't beat yourself up for not yet arriving at an imaginary place while you change the world along the way. Give yourself the same grace and compassion you would give to me. Allow that for yourself. Don't think so much that you overlook the obvious. You just might see past all that you've achieved.
And don't move so quickly that you overstep the moment. You might just miss all that beauty that you're creating. This isn't a pep talk. This is me holding up a mirror so that you can see the value add. You're not merely an IOU to some future self. You are all the people around you whose lives you make better every day. The lives you touch by being you.
There's an old idea that once you've started, you're halfway there. How does that make sense, one might wonder. Once you've started, you've only just begun. And that's true, technically. But here's the thing. The journey, the ins and outs, ups and downs, trials and tribulations, They can all be dealt with. They knock us down from time to time, no doubt.
But we learn, we adjust, and carry on as we move forward. Most success stories, they're crushed, not because of that adversity along the way, but because they never begin. They never take shape or materialize. We can't make them real in our heads. We can't convince ourselves that they'll ever be anything other than fiction. We think that's for someone else.
We look around and assume that reality is different than my reality. And overcoming this mental constraint is always the most challenging step. And that saying, the one I continuously find myself coming back to, human beings always follow through on who they believe themselves to be, continues to be true. If you don't believe you're worthy of something, its pursuit is lost before it began.
So while the mind tries to paint pictures of how scary that road is ahead, how it's too different or big or complex, understand that should you move forward, you'll find all that complexity can be broken down one day, one situation, one little step at a time. The only real demon here is the possibility of inaction because you couldn't make yourself believe it.
You couldn't see yourself at the top of that mountain. And so the front door was never opened. Emerson says hitch your wagon to a star. A beautiful reminder that that star is proof your dreams are real. And only as real as the conviction with which you move towards them. Green light your own glory, your own contentment.
Because contrary to what we might think, no one comes up and bestows that upon us. To live life fully is a decision. Decision, Latin root words, cut off. It's removing and abandoning your restraint in order to be more authentically you. In order that you'll give yourself permission to chase down that which makes you feel alive and soak up all that aligns with your heart and soul.
Once you start, you're halfway there. And oh, that first step. Often perceived as the beginning, but in actuality a point few ever give themselves the luxury of experiencing. Step one, believe it's possible. Step two, believe you're worthy. Step three, go. Everything else works itself out. You're capable of dancing through life's chaos, of managing the world's unknowns,
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Chapter 7: How does one define true courage in the face of adversity?
See, those feelings of discontent, the emotions that rise to the surface as our minds sort through that catalog of regret. You know, the emotions that try and pull you back down into the very moment in which they occurred. If you let them lead you by the hand back into a manufactured hell, they will. And down you will go.
reliving an expired pain that you can neither prevent nor do anything about. After all, it is the past. But alternatively, if we can do one of the hardest things for humans to do, which is depersonalize the occurrence, remove the emotion and find the value You stand face to face with an advantage in life that is exponential.
Not only are you refusing to be defined or tortured by yesterday, but you're creating a framework by which you can actually use that pain to make a better right now. You're acknowledging that your mistakes are not indicative of a current reflection in the mirror. They're not metal bars keeping you closed in. They're opportunities in disguise.
A friend of mine once told me, from our pain comes our purpose. From our despair comes our hope. It's from the times we got it oh so completely wrong that we can now arm ourselves with the ability to get it right. to be better and faster and stronger and wiser. The reality, or life in the big city, as the saying goes, is having to fall in order to rise again.
Because if nothing falls, there are no ashes from which to rebuild. We change when we've lost. We evolve when we're cornered. We become more when life shakes our worldview. There's power in this suffering. That is, if you choose to find it. And that's always a decision that's ours to make.
Again, those same memories that can pull you down if you let them can also be used to elevate yourself higher than you've ever been. They're just saying that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% what you do about it. And when you think about it, it's obvious. Because knowledge is only as powerful as our willingness to put that knowledge to work.
Yesterday's pain, its lessons, can be the very reason you transform, evolve to a higher version of yourself, but that's only if you stop using those lessons as an attack on your self-esteem. Start seeing them as the gateway to tomorrow. Otherwise, they'll remain that ball and chain around your ankles.
Is the mistake that cost you your business, maybe the inaction that fractured a relationship, a swing and miss that hurt your pride somewhere along the way, are they going to remain sources of pain in your mind, mental images or reflections of where you fell short? Or are they going to fuel the comeback, the sequel? When we fall, we're given one of life's greatest gifts, a part two.
Armed with the knowledge we otherwise would never have had. Armed with an understanding that with the failures comes the strength. As I've grown, I've placed more and more emphasis on thinking. How do I perceive myself? Because when that slips, life is never too far behind.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of the journey over the destination?
And this understanding has helped me to roll up my sleeves and continue forward. When I'm disappointed with yesterday, or overwhelmed by the conditions or landscape of the moment, when I question how much I have left. But I've found that when I look hard enough, there's always something to draw on. And that's the message of note. That's what we must show ourselves.
When you're on that ledge, this can be where you're at your best. This is where you get to uncover just how deep-rooted your greatness is. This is where you set the standard and the pace for everything to come. It's not about what happens to you. No one escapes adversity. No one lives free of discomfort or misfortune or struggle. No, it will always be about what you do with what happens to you.
In other words, It's not the event, it's the response. Not the obstacle, but the ability to navigate around it. Not the wave, but the ability to ride its momentum to something greater. It is not what happens to you, it is what you do about what happens to you. The famous Roman emperor and stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius said, you have power over your mind, not outside events.
Realize this and you will find strength. And I think this realization comes down to the fact that there is always a way buried underneath it all, something powerful to leverage. But getting to the value calls for a rewiring. A change in the questions that we ask. Not, how could this happen to me? But, how can I be better tomorrow than I am now because of what happened to me?
Not, can I still be that person or accomplish what I set out to? but I am that person. Now how will I adjust my path so that I get there? We're operating within a world of value, limitless opportunity. The difficulty simply pushes us to that value faster, expedites the process. It forces us to open our eyes and see that the world works for us.
So you take, for example, the fear of starting something new. That fear, it doesn't have to be an endpoint or a red light indicator. Fear doesn't mean you're not qualified or prepared or equipped. It simply lets you know that you have finally acquired the courage to step out of this safety Of the only world you knew and into the turbulence of growth. Onto the path of something better.
And where it's easy to move away from that feeling. To turn your back on the chaos and retreat to something simpler. Maybe something more predictable or contained. What if you viewed the fear as the price that we all have to pay to pull the curtain back on the best things life has to offer?
Changing the question from, will I be afraid, to instead, this is important, this is meaningful, therefore it's inevitable. that I will experience fear, but what will I do about it? How will I conduct myself amidst the fear? Will I continue forward? Those are the questions that contain the value. Right, I can't keep the water from rising or the walls from caving in.
No, that's an inevitability where I'm going. The worthwhile road always has its adversity. But will I use that water to learn to swim? The walls to climb, to adapt and scale? What will I make of this? That's the question that becomes the difference. And sure, you could stay away. You could choose not to take the path that presents the danger and the turbulence.
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