Police Psychology | Persistence in Law Enforcement

Gary S. Aumiller, Ph.D. ABPP

I saw the musical On Your Feet last night on Broadway.  It was about Gloria and Emilio Estafan and their story of a rise to fame and fortune.  She was the first big Hispanic crossover in the music field and later Emilio had his hands in other Latin crossovers that followed like Jennifer Lopez, Shakira, Ricky Martin and Marc Anthony.

Early in their careers, no one would play their music because it was Latin and had Latin rhythms.  It was fine for their record producers to say they were tops on the charts in the Spanish music market, but it wasn’t going anywhere on the English market.  Their record company would not hear of it even when they brought in an English song.  He didn’t want a Spanish group doing English music — no record company wanted that.  So, Emilio and Gloria started playing the English songs everywhere, gave many free gigs and concerts at clubs, blasted it from car radios as they traveled around, got stations to play it out of the blue — they created their own publicity with pure persistence.  They ignored what the experts told them and were being purely persistent.  Life is very much that way, persistence wins out.  But, when are you too persistent…? (more…)