The Secret to Success — Never Give Up
If you keep trying, sooner or later you will find success
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” ― Winston S. Churchill
I received an email advising Publisher’s Spotlight’s submission form wasn’t appearing when the user was visiting the site. I took a look at the site, received a critical error message from my content management system. My first thought was, “What is causing this?”
I took a look at my backups and update logs. I decided to roll back to a previous set up that had worked a couple of days prior. That didn’t work.
“Nothing will work unless you do.” — Maya Angelou
I then took a look at the software I was running to see if there was anything that wasn’t particularly needed for the site and deactivated each one. One by one I deactivated (and removed) the programs that I didn’t need any more, but which were active and using up computer resources. I ended up doing some much needed spring cleaning, but it didn’t solve the problem.
“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” ― Calvin Coolidge
I then tried changing the website’s theme. That did the trick. I could see the submission form when I was looking via the control panel, so that was a pretty good clue that it might have been theme related.
I’m glad I changed the theme. I like change and it was getting to be time to update the look of the site. And, for whatever reason, the old theme wasn’t working correctly. If I want to use it again, I will remove it and reinstall.
“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success — but only if you persist.” ― Isaac Asimov
The nice thing about trying the various different trouble shooting methods is that it exemplified the philosophy of not giving up. The fix was somewhere in the site and probably related to some software that had updated sometime between the time the site was working properly and when it wasn’t. I kept running down my mental checklist of items to check to see if it would restore the site’s functionality until I found something that caused it to work normally.
“The three great essentials to achieve anything worthwhile are, first, hard work; second, stick-to-itiveness; third, common sense.” ― Thomas A. Edison
I also did some tidying up while I was troubleshooting. It fits in with my minimalist philosophy. Since I didn’t need to run a lot of extra software, I removed the redundant programs while I was trouble shooting. Doing that in itself might prevent future problems as it reduces the complexity of the system.
When I was done getting Publisher’s Spotlight operational again, I decided to add in the ability to write a custom title so that the headlines on the posts wouldn’t just be “Publisher’s Spotlight” and a sequential number.
“Flaming enthusiasm, backed up by horse sense and persistence, is the quality that most frequently makes for success.”
— Dale Carnegie
It took me a couple of tries to change all of the software settings and to update the submission form’s software, but trial and error finally lead the way to success. The site is working great now. I fixed some issues that were delaying posting, and I updated the look and functionality of the website. It was a win that started from a site failure.
This lesson also works for anything else you might face in life.
Keep working and improving and you will find success.
Chris Hedges, JD, is an editor at ILLUMINATION, The Bad Influence, and Red Curtain Erotica and owns Publisher’s Spotlight and Unicorn x29.