When I was a boy, my father worried that I was unlikely to go far in life until I overcame my stubborn nature, and whenever he tried to convince me of that, I stubbornly persisted the he was confusing stubbornness with persistence.
One day, after putting up with my hard-headedness as long as he intended to, he said, “Junior, since you work with Jaybird every day, I’ll ask him about all this persistence you profess to have.”
Early the next morning, my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird took his work crew to a field on Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm where the cotton seedlings needed thinning so that they wouldn’t crowd each other as they matured. After handing all of us sharpened hoes, he said those words we’d heard so many time: “Start yo’ rows.”