How to Grow in Perseverance

Prior to graduate school, I taught medieval history and literature to middle-schoolers at a small classical school. This school had all the advantages of a well-structured curriculum and committed teachers. It was also a school where parents were involved and invested in their children, which goes a long way in supporting learning outcomes.[1] Even so, I could easily identify students who had unrestricted access to iPhones and other screens. They were generally less curious, struggled with imaginative tasks like creative writing, and lacked perseverance. They were distractible and had difficulty completing sustained tasks.

I am now a decade removed from the middle-school classroom where I first observed the negative impacts of screens on students, and our society has become even more technology-saturated and device-dependent in the intervening years. John Burn-Murdoch, a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics, recently shared findings from the Understanding America Study (2024) indicating a significant decline in perseverance and an increase in distractibility among American youth as a result of unrestricted internet usage.[2]

Why Perseverance Matters

Perseverance is “persist[ing] long in something good until it is accomplished.”[3] It involves endurance or staying in place through difficulty, and it is an important virtue because good things (such as fulfilling work projects, completing good books, and parenting children) often take a long time. Relationships require perseverance, and citizenship requires that we can "remain in place" through difficult conversations. Also, the ability to undertake a task and see it through to completion is an important part of human freedom. Maybe no one else is making us do something, but if we are too fickle or irresolute to complete our own objectives, we are not truly free.[4]

For these reasons, the decline in perseverance is a problem. Thankfully, we do not have to resign ourselves to its decline. We can intentionally cultivate perseverance in ourselves and in students. A few guidelines for doing so are as follows.

1. Be careful what you practice. We live in a digital context that packages content into bite-sized forms (e.g., TikTok, Instagram, and X/Twitter). These are attractive, flashy spaces that undermine our attention and condition us to expect constant stimulation with minimal thinking. The fact that we can now outsource certain forms of cognition to chatbots and artificial intelligence makes the situation worse, since people avoid sustained thinking altogether. Everything is fast—including the rate at which we lose focus and give up.

Today, 81 percent of children under age 13 have their own devices, and 54 percent of caretakers report that their children are addicted to screens.[5] These children participate in a formative practice, nearly all day long, that undermines their attention. Unsurprisingly, they are ill-equipped to undertake tasks that require sustained focus.

Thus, the first caution is to examine our relationships with screens and evaluate how they are training our attention. Unsurprisingly, spending hours per day passively consuming short-form content will have negative costs on our character.

2. Stay in place. Stabilitas loci was a practice employed by the Desert Fathers, a group of ascetic Christian hermits living in Egypt and Mesopotamia from the third to seventh centuries. It was a practice of "staying in place" or training our “physical frailty and fickleness of will” to remain on task. For example, during manual labor, they would train their attention on the task at hand and practice "staying in place" rather than giving up or mentally flitting off to something else.[6] A contemporary athletic equivalent is remaining in place on a long run, attempting neither to mentally vacate the scene nor succumb to quitting.

Virtues are acquired by practice. We have to do them to be them. This means we need to build in the time to practice persevering. We can do so during athletic practice ("staying in place" during a run), or commit our attention to reading, writing, or gardening for an extended period of time. The goal is to counter the short attention span reinforced in digital contexts.

3. Develop a sports-like approach to growing in character. Sometimes my college students tell me they find course readings daunting, so they assume they are nonreaders and give up. But in the same way that you would not attempt to lift 75-pound dumbbells your first time at the gym or complete a marathon for your first run, you should not expect to read a whole article on your first attempt. You should ease your way in—meeting yourself where you are, then slowly increase your reading time as your attention grows. Perseverance takes practice, and practice takes time.

It is important to remember that your baseline is not a final statement on your character. You are not stuck with a lack of intellectual perseverance forever just because you are currently a fickle person. But developing this virtue takes time and intentional practice. It can help to have a sports-like mentality toward developing virtue.

Ethics and Morality Essential Reads

The Ethics of Microlooting

Why Do Our Moral Views Keep Changing?

Final Thoughts

Our screen-saturated culture is grim where attention is concerned, and the statistics about a decline in perseverance are worrisome. Nevertheless, we can reverse some of these damages by focusing on developing the virtue.