Man must strive and striving he must, er...

What a couple of demotivaters from the past week of course you do.

First up: twitchers spend hours lying in the mud waiting for a view a rare bird. Eventually it appears, just in time to be eaten by a buzzard.

“The funny thing is, neither of us had seen a buzzard make a kill before either, so from a bird-spotting point of view it was two birds with one stone.” That's the spirit.

Second: man spends 26 years trying to solve a Rubik's cube. Graham Parker said:

I have missed important events to stay in and solve it and I would lie awake at night thinking about it. I have had wrist and back problems from spending hours on it but it was all worth it.

Persistence is often claimed as a virtue; oftentimes it is one of the deadly virtues however. It can all to easily become a form of mania. Literary characters as varied as Widmerpool, Mr Pooter and Captain Ahab were all persistent after all. I am beginning to think that learning when to give up is an essential quality, an inability to admit defeat in the face of overwhelming odds is a form of madness, after all.

Remember: The journey of a thousand miles sometimes ends very, very badly.