Study. Work. Hope. Perseverance.

Helping the deaf to communicate was what truly motivated Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. Perhaps that’s because his mother and his wife were both deaf. “If I can make a deaf-mute talk,” Bell said, “I can make metal talk.” For five frustrating and impoverished years, he experimented with a variety of materials to make a metal disc that would vibrate in response to sound, reproduce those sounds, and send them over an electrified wire. During a visit to Washington, DC, he called on Joseph Henry, a scientist who was a pioneer in research related to electricity. He presented his ideas to him and asked his advice – should he let someone else perfect the telephone or should he do it himself? Henry encouraged Bell to do it himself, to which he complained that he lacked the necessary knowledge of electricity. Henry’s brief answer was, “Then get it.” And so Bell studied electricity. A year later, when he obtained a patent for the telephone, the patent office officials credited him with knowing more about electricity than all the other inventors combined. Study, work, hope, and perseverance are common things, but they are the keys to uncommon success in life. And as Bell discovered, perseverance is often the most challenging. Longfellow wrote, “The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight. But they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.” Solomon wrote, “Do you see a man who excels in his work? He will stand before kings; he will not stand before unknown men.”