Diligence

Quality of the month for March

We are told by dictionaries that diligence is "devoted and painstaking effort to accomplish an undertaking." It is that quality within a person that gives rise to "steady, earnest, attentive and energetic application and effort in a pursuit, vocation or study."

Two PCC members gave examples of diligence. Said one:

"Diligence means staying with your goal until you achieve it . . . . There is an old adage that 'Nothing good ever comes easy.' Take a look at Thomas Edison, who tried 1,000 different combinations before he found the right materials for the light bulb."

Said the other:

"To be a diligent parent, I must keep focused on where my child needs to be at the end of child-rearing — to be a person of character. That requires hard work in giving guidance, even in the details of the child's life."

A Worthington student wrote simply that diligence is the quality of "never giving up until your goal is reached." Another one said that "diligence necessitates hard work. There is no other way. But if the goal we are seeking is worthwhile, all the working, pounding, hounding, and advocating is worth the sacrifice."

Notable voices from the past help us see other dimensions of this quality:

	Cervantes:		"Diligence is the mother of good fortune."
	William Penn:		"Patience and diligence, like faith, move mountains."
	Samuel Johnson:		"Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great things are performed not by strength, but perseverance."
	Thomas Edison:		"There is no substitute for hard work."
	R. H. Tawney:		"The virtues of enterprise, diligence, and thrift are the indispensable foundations of complex and vigorous civilizations. It was Puritanism which, by investing them with a supernatural sanction, turned them from an unsocial eccentricity into a habit and a religion."

What does it mean for you to be a diligent person? What does it mean for your family to be a diligent family? For your institution to be a diligent institution? For your community to be a diligent community?