"Gee, Brain, what do you want to do tonight?"
"The same thing we do every night, Pinky, try to take over the world."
Every night, without fail, two animated lab rats chase the same impossible goal. And every night, they fail. Yet the next evening, they're right back at it, scheming, building, plotting, undeterred.
It's absurd, of course. But there's something in Brain's relentless drive that feels… instructive.
Benjamin Franklin once said, "Energy and persistence conquer all things." He also called diligence "the mother of good luck." His point wasn't that luck doesn't exist, but that luck tends to visit those who are already in motion, grinding away, showing up day after day.
In a world hooked on instant gratification, persistence has become a kind of superpower. We expect big results from small efforts. We overvalue the idea of a "lucky break" and undervalue the unglamorous grind that makes luck possible in the first place.
The truth is, lasting success often looks like repeated failure in disguise. Churchill put it best: "Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm." Brain's nightly defeats aren't really defeats, they're iterations. Each setback is a lesson in what didn't work, and each night is a chance to apply that knowledge.
Too often, we let early failure convince us to stop. We frame ourselves as victims of circumstance rather than agents of change. But the people, and yes, even fictional lab rats, who achieve big things aren't necessarily smarter or luckier. They're simply the ones who keep going when it would be easier to quit.
In the end, tenacity is less about being fearless and more about being stubborn in the right direction. It's showing up when the world isn't watching, learning when the scoreboard says you're losing, and persisting until momentum tips in your favour.
Because whether you're running a startup, chasing a creative dream, or, like Brain, trying to take over the world, the formula is the same: energy, persistence, and a refusal to let failure be the final chapter.