Often during boyhood, whenever Dad warned that stubbornness would prevent me from succeeding in life, I protested that he was confusing stubbornness with persistence, to which he replied one day, “Since you work with Jaybird, I’ll ask him about all this persistence you profess to have.”
The next morning, my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird took his work crew, myself included, to a field on Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm where cotton seedlings needed thinning to prevent crowding as the plants grew. After handing us hoes, he said those words we heard so often: “Okay, boys, start yo’ rows.”
