Curious about Resolve: What Does It Mean to You? And Do You Have and Use It?

Definition of Resolve: To separate the component parts of; to reduce to the constituent elements; said of compound substances; hence, sometimes, to melt, or dissolve. To be settled in opinion; to be convinced.

“Your success and happiness lies in you. Resolve to keep happy, and your joy and you shall form an invincible host against difficulties.” - Helen Keller, American author

I chose “resolve” for this week’s theme, because I was so inspired by Dan Kennedy’s excellent article in his monthly, marketing letter.

To quote him, “For most, the legitimacy of resolve is an unwelcome idea. Whether or not you take a midnight utterance at a party seriously isn’t important, but to what extent you subscribe to the legitimacy of resolve is vital. The sports cliché is that big games tend to be won by the team that wants it most and refused not to win. Yes, talent matters, but less than resolve. Personally, I think I have little if any talent, but I’ve had a whole lot of resolve throughout my life.”

I started to think about the power of the word resolve as I was finding so many great quotations. Don’t you feel that you would be more likely to achieve your goals and intentions if you stated, “I resolve to accomplish this?”

Let me share some of the quotations I found:

• “To make our way, we must have firm resolve, persistence, tenacity. We must gear ourselves to work hard all the way. We can never let up.” - Ralph Bunche, American diplomat
• “Wise to resolve, and patient to perform.” – Homer, Greek poet
• “Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.” - Horace Mann, American educator
• “The function of a genius is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.” - Hugh Trevor-Roper, English historian
• “There is no chance, no destiny, no fate, that can circumvent or hinder or control the firm resolve of a determined soul.” - Ella Wheeler Wilcox, American writer
• “Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it.” – Rene Descartes, French mathematician
• “Determination gives you the resolve to keep going in spite of the roadblocks that lay before you.” - Denis Waitley, American writer

And a few more:

• “I was only the servant of my country and had I, at any moment, failed to express her unflinching resolve to fight and conquer, I should at once have been rightly cast aside.” - Winston Churchill, British statesman
• “This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.” - Barack Obama, American President
• “There is no scarcity of opportunity to make a living at what you love; there's only scarcity of resolve to make it happen.” - Wayne Dyer, American psychologist
• “However, lifestyle intervention requires discipline with a tangible end result that is within reach. It requires personal resolve, a lifelong commitment.” - Tim Holden, American politician
• “I just think that there are those people that their resolve is strengthened by what it is that's keeping them down, and there are some people that will buckle under it. You never know which one is which until you get into the eighth or ninth round of the fight.” - Ron Perlman, American actor
• “If you resolve to give up smoking, drinking and loving, you don't actually live longer; it just seems longer.” - Clement Freud, British writer
• “In life there are no problems, that is, objective and external choices; there is only the life which we do not resolve as a problem but which we live as an experience, whatever the final result may be.” - Alberto Moravia, Italian novelist

And I do love two more for you to think about this week:

“Resolve and thou art free.” - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American poet

“Resolve not to be poor: whatever you have, spend less. Poverty is a great enemy to human happiness; it certainly destroys liberty, and it makes some virtues impracticable, and others extremely difficult.” - Samuel Johnson, English author

What do you resolve to achieve? I would love to read your feedback.