By Henrylito D. Tacio

Vince Lombardi, an American football coach, once said: “The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.”

If you don’t believe his statement, let me share with you the story of Carlos “Caloy” Yulo, the country’s remarkable and talented gymnast. Although gymnastics lacks widespread popularity in the Philippines, he steadfastly pursued his passion.

His journey began with the encouragement of his grandfather, Rodrigo Fisco, who introduced him to the sport. At the tender age of seven, Yulo began to refine his abilities in a rundown public gymnasium located at the Rizal Memorial Coliseum.

In 2009, he participated in the Palarong Pambansa in Tacloban, representing the National Capital Region. During that initial competition, he did not secure a victory, acknowledging that his training was insufficient. In response, he dedicated himself to rigorous training, and upon returning to the same event, he ultimately achieved success.

From that point onward, it was merely a question of time. Despite achieving significant accolades and honors, he was unable to secure the coveted Olympic medal in Tokyo, Japan. Nevertheless, this experience did not dissuade him from pursuing his aspirations.

“It’s not always about winning in the competition,” Yulo shared in a post he wrote on Instagram in 2022. “It’s all about standing up after that fall. To give your all till the dismount, to not give up on what you love, to search for ways to improve and to not lose yourself in training every day. This is definitely not easy but this is my lifestyle.”

True enough, at the Paris Olympics, he ultimately claimed the gold medal—two, in fact! He etched his name in history as the first Filipino athlete to secure two gold medals at the Olympics and the first to achieve this feat in a single Olympic event.

But there was a time when he almost wanted to quit. “When I was in Japan, I thought about it a lot of times,” he said in an interview with TV Patrol. “I cannot even count it on my hands. I was lonely. It was hard, especially for my age.”

But he persevered. As Michael Lim Ubac wrote in his Inquirer column, “Moving Into High Gear”: “Yulo is the embodiment of the never-say-die attitude of millions of our fellow Filipinos who persevere in this graft-infested country and those who tirelessly work abroad because giving up is not an option.”

The dictionary defines perseverance as “continued effort to do or achieve something despite difficulties, failure, or opposition.” As Colin Powell puts it: “Success is the result of perfection, hard work, learning from failure, loyalty, and persistence.”

The world is full of people who persevere—and succeed in life. Stephen King, before he became a best-selling author, admitted that he hammered a nail into the wall when he was younger and kept all his rejection slips there until he reached 100. In his wonderful On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, he wrote: “When you get to 100, give yourself a pat on the back… You’ve arrived.”

Award-winning writer F. Scott Fitzgerald had the same experience. By July 1919, he had accumulated 122 rejection slips, which he pinned in his room. It was not until his novel This Side of Paradise was published that his short stories started appearing in magazines.

When British author J.K. Rowling began shopping around her first book about a boy wizard, it was turned down by a dozen publishers. Eventually, the children’s division of Bloomsbury paid the modest sum of about $2,400 for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—and ended up making hundreds of millions from the magic at Hogwarts.

There are those who believe that being handicapped is an obstacle to becoming successful. But Maria Gracia Cielo “Grace” Magno Padaca, the former governor of Isabela, proved otherwise. The physically challenged look to her, a polio victim, as proof that being handicapped is no barrier to success (valedictorian in elementary and high school and magna cum laude in college). At the age of 44, she was bestowed the 2008 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Government Service for “empowering Isabela voters to reclaim their democratic right to elect leaders of their own choosing, and to contribute as full partners in their own development.”

Like Grace Padaca, former Senator Ernesto Herrera overcame a physical handicap caused by polio during his childhood to become one of the country’s outstanding leaders. He is the first Asian and the second individual to receive the George Meany International Human Rights Award in 1985. He was likewise conferred the International Award of Honor by the International Narcotics Enforcement Officers Association of New York.

Before Herrera, there was Apolinario Mabini, a political philosopher and revolutionary who wrote a constitutional plan for the first Philippine republic of 1899–1901 and served as its first prime minister in 1899. In Philippine history texts, he is often referred to as “the Sublime Paralytic” and “the Brains of the Revolution.” To his enemies and detractors, he was referred to as the “Dark Chamber of the President.”

“I thank God for my handicaps, for through them, I have found myself, my work, and my God,” said Helen Keller, an American author and educator who was blind and deaf. She was not born blind and deaf; it was not until nineteen months of age that she came down with an illness described by doctors as “an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain,” which could have been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last long, but it left her deaf and blind.

Many famous men and women have had to work hard to reach what they wanted in life. “Your key to personal success is persistence,” said Mack R. Douglas.

Take the case of Manny Pacquiao. He was born poor and had to step into the boxing ring at an early age to help his mother feed the family and allow him to go to school. When he was 15, his trainer brought him to Manila, where he worked in a tailoring shop during the day and trained after 5 p.m.

“I learned to sew,” said the boxer from Dadiangas. He did other odd jobs like working in construction as a painter and welder. He sold flowers in front of the church every Sunday morning. “That’s how tough my life was.”

In the boxing arena, he won his first 12 fights before he lost by knockout. After that, he went back to work in construction. When he told a friend that he would stop boxing because he had already lost, he was chastised instead. “That’s part of boxing,” he was told. “You’re a good fighter; that loss will give you a lesson in boxing.”

Thinking it over, he went back to training after a month of hiatus. And then it was all the way up. “Boxing helps you to discipline yourself, but it is very, very difficult,” he told Jim Plouffe, former editor-in-chief of Reader’s Digest. “I think boxing is not only a sport but also a business.”

Don’t be beaten by poverty. In fact, it was poverty that drove Chinese martial arts superstar Jackie Chan to become what he is now. “When I was young,” he says, “we were very poor. The Red Cross gave me milk, rice, and clothes.”

When he was seven, his parents accepted housekeeping jobs in Australia. He was left under the care of a martial arts master at a Beijing opera school in Hong Kong. It was here that he learned about life. At 5 in the morning, Jackie and his schoolmates practiced acrobatics, stick fighting, and knife fighting. After lunch, it was singing and dancing lessons and martial arts. At midnight, Jackie would climb into bed, exhausted and often hungry.

He was still a student when he started acting. He appeared in more than a dozen films, but he was not content with what was going on in his life. “My only ambition was to be a stuntman,” he admits.

In the early 1970s, he was already known as a daring stuntman. Wanting to move beyond the ranks of Hong Kong’s movie extras, he tried out for the remake of a Bruce Lee film, New Fist of Fury—and won the role. Although it was a success, he never wanted to follow in the footsteps of the late action hero. And in Snake in the Eagle’s Shadow, he finally emerged as his own man. The rest is history.

“Successful people are not gifted; they just work hard—then succeed on purpose,” said G.K. Nielson. Dr. Jean-Louis Etienne, the man who walked alone to the North Pole, subscribed to that idea. As he explained: “There are two great times of happiness: when you are haunted by a dream, and when you realize it. Between the two, there’s a lot of uncertainty, a strong urge to let it all drop. But you have to follow your dreams to the end. There are abandoned bicycles in every garage because their owners’ backsides got too sore the first time they rode them. They didn’t understand that pain is a necessary part of learning.

“I almost gave up a thousand times before reaching those moments of happiness when I forgot that I was cold. You can accomplish this through painting or music, provided you concede that, before you can play a Bach sonata, you must first learn to play scales. It is only through perseverance that each of us can find ourselves. It is up to each of us to find his own Pole.”

“Success isn’t about strength or talent—it’s the courage to rise after every fall.”