anyone else. Persistence is the quality that will ultimately guarantee your success. Your willingness to persist in the face of every adver- sity can be your greatest asset. It can be the one factor that guaran- tees your success. If you refuse to quit, you must ultimately succeed. Just as in baseball, you won’t ultimately hit a home run unless you keep on swinging. In 30 years of studying successful people, I have discov- ered one fact over and over. No one was ever defeated until they ac- cepted defeat as a reality. No one can ever defeat you but yourself. When you discipline yourself to do what you should do, whether you feel like it or not, and you use this inner strength to build high levels of courage and persistence within yourself, you will become an incredibly powerful person.You will soon feel that there is nothing that you cannot accomplish
of them were willing to climb into a playpen with a dog and remain confined there petting and scratching the dog while everyone else left the room. Moreover, when the researchers tested the children's fear levels again, one month later, they found that the improvement had not diminished during that time; in fact, the children were more willing than ever to interact with dogs. An important practical discov- ery was made in a second study of children who were exceptionally afraid of dogs (Bandura 8{ Menlove, 1968): To reduce these children's fears, it was not necessary to 'A program of investigation conducted by Kenneth Craig and his associates demonstrates how the experience of pain can be affected by the principle of social proof. In one study (Craig 8{ Prkachin, 1978), subjects who received a series of electric shocks felt less pain (as indicated by self-reports, psy-
annaabi.ee 
