He who stands until the end, gains.

In the late Han, Liu Bei (劉備, 161–223) was a wandering warlord. He claimed imperial lineage and dreamed of restoring the Han, but compared with Cao Cao and Sun Quan he lacked both a base and able men. He heard of a young scholar called "Master Sleeping Dragon" (臥龍) — Zhuge Liang (諸葛亮, 181–234), a recluse of twenty-seven who farmed and studied at a thatched cottage in Longzhong, Jingzhou. In 207, Liu Bei went to seek him out, together with his generals Guan Yu and Zhang Fei. On the first visit — Zhuge Liang was not home. On the second — again, not home. Zhang Fei grew angry: "Why go to such lengths for a mere country scholar?" But Liu Bei would not be deterred. The third visit. It was winter that day. Zhuge Liang was home but napping, and Liu Bei, asking that he not be woken, waited for hours outside the door in the falling snow. When at last Zhuge Liang awoke and met him, that famous "Plan to Divide the Realm in Three" (天下三分之計) was born. Years later, Zhuge Liang recalled in his "Memorial on Sending Out the Troops" (出師表): "先帝不以臣卑鄙, 猥自枉屈, 三顧臣於草廬之中" — The late Emperor, not minding my lowliness, deigned to bend himself and visited me three times in my thatched cottage.

The Latin verb "persistere" is made of two elements: per- (all the way, thoroughly) + sistere (to stand, to halt). Of these, sistere is the reduplicated form of stare (to stand), which derives from the Proto-Indo-European *sta- (to stand) — the shared root of the English stand, state, status, and statue. Translated literally, it means "to remain standing to the end." In Roman times it referred to "holding a fortress to the last in a siege" or "not abandoning one's position in an argument." The core, physically and semantically, was "not leaving one's place." The word entered English in the 1530s by way of the French "persister." In early English texts it was often used in a religious context, meaning "keeping the faith to the end." In the 16th-century Reformation, for instance, Protestants refusing to renounce their doctrine under persecution were said to "persist in faith." After the 19th century the word spread into science and engineering: "persistence of vision" — the phenomenon of the eye "holding onto" an image to the end — became the physical basis of film, and in psychology "persistence," akin to "grit," began to be measured as a key variable of success.