Back in early 1988, newly married to my 5th wife and rapidly building a sales mini-empire that was growing explosively, things were looking might good from just about every conceivable angle. Finances were improving by the month, my reputation as a hot marketer was on the rise, and I bought into the illusory idea that in many ways my worries were over.

Twenty years later, in 2008, things are slightly different. At age 64, two divorces and one bankruptcy have been added to the mix. I find myself working a blue collar job behind the wheel of a water tanker, working 12-hour night shifts to keep a roof over the heads of my seventh wife and our three cats plus one classy little gecko. The mini-empire sales effort made me my first million dollars, of which I have not a penny left to show.

This is not to complain, nor is it to brag (as the old question goes--are you bragging or complaining?), but simply to pose the query: When the bumps in the road came along, how did I keep on going without missing a lick? Yes, I fully realize others have faced much greater challenges with much greater poise...yet we also know of gazillions of folks who simply crumble after the umpteenth divorce or financial disappointment. So: How do those who keep on keeping on...keep on?

And now that I've gotten this far with this Hub, I've realized I don't know the answer! Hopefully, some of you readers will be able to flesh out this topic with some really cogent, insightful comments! But since I did start this, here are a few things I've noticed about the un-quitters:

1. The individual who serves a "cause" is often hard to stop cold. On the negative side of this equation we have the fanatic terrorists who hit the U.S.A. on 9-11-01, of course. But on a more positive note, we might consider Black Hills Saga, a song I wrote in 1993 while living in Custer, South Dakota:

I wrote Black Hills Saga in the middle of the night. My (now ex-) wife heard me singing it in the living room and got up to find out what radio station was--huh? She thought her husband and his guitar were a professional recording being broadcast over the commercial airwaves? Yup. She did. Probably the highest compliment she ever paid me.

Of course, she came out of a sound sleep. Perhaps if I'd written it in the middle of the day, she wouldn't have....

Point being, from that night forward, the song had a hold on me. It sort of kept on keeping on, wouldn't let me give up. When I had a band, we performed Black Hills Saga regularly. When I recorded a 10-song video in Nashville, it was the title cut. But nothing happened. Sometimes I went for years at a time without doing much at all in the way of music.

And then, just weeks ago, I began publishing videos, shotgunning them to the Internet. Black Hills Saga went into the mix, not the first song uploaded, and for a while not the most popular.

Until now. On MetaCafe, "someone" has discovered Black Hills Saga--and it happened very recently on 5-5-08, when it went from "nothing" to 215 views in a single day. Not viral status by a long shot, but some folks were obviously telling their friends. On Cinco de Mayo, on MetaCafe, Black Hills Saga accounted for 99% of the total number of viewings of all eleven videos I had uploaded by that date.

Which is to say, I feel a bit like that song is a cause unto itself, and I had to Keep On Keeping On with it, because it wouldn't let me permanently quit!

2. Sometimes it helps if you're just too stupid to know you can't do something.

Two very creative people always come to mind in this regard. The first is Edgar Rice Burroughs, the author of the original Tarzan series as well as Mars adventure stories featuring John Carter and other memorable characters. Burroughs walked the city streets (of Chicago, if memory serves--feel free to correct me if I'm wrong!) with the manuscript of Tarzan of the Apes, being rejected by publisher after publisher.

But he didn't know he couldn't sell his piece of literary trash, he did eventually find a publisher, and Tarzan became a timeless classic. (Never mind that most people have no idea that the famous Tarzan yell was--in the original books--only uttered after he had killed. Also never mind that his son was never "Boy" but a deadly young man known among the Great Apes as Korak...meaning Killer...whose trademark "sound" after a kill was a strained silence....)

Okay, enough about Burroughs. The second person who comes to mind as too stupid to know something couldn't be done: Sylvester Stallone. When he created the first Rocky movie, pretty much the entire movie industry turned their noses up at the idea. Once the movie came out and became an instant blockbuster, Sly's future was assured--but he stated quite clearly in later interviews that if he'd had any idea how impossible it was going to be to get filmed in the first place, he might well never have done it.

Well, they do say ignorance is bliss. Whoever "they" are.

A third force that keeps people keeping on can sometimes be:

3. The desperation to find an answer, along with the certainty that the answer DOES exist.

For example, I've long studied a spiritual path that includes awareness of one's Third Eye as a fact. This spiritual organ, when open, is known to enhance one's awareness of the inner worlds, even to help us gain insights that help make sense of this "regular" world in which we move and breathe. When I first read about such a thing, I felt it to be true.

I also remained quite confident that my own spiritual eye was slammed shut, barred with iron, and probablly badly rusted as well. This did not seem like any divine punishment, nothing like that, but it did give rise to Windswept Road in 1993:

Obviously, I haven't even touched on most of the better known motivations for not giving up--motivations like caring for a loved one who needs you, personal pride and self image that keep you moving, the need for success as revenge against people who might have bullied you in grade school or told you not to give up your day job when you began singing, etc.

But that's why these Hubs allow for Comments. Feel free to share your own insights regarding how you have Kept On Keeping On when the going got tough. This particular page, I feel, is more an invitation to discourse than anything else.....

Thanks for reading,

Ghost32