Does life sometimes occur to you as though each day you’re rolling a rock up a hill? Then, each evening while you sleep the rock rolls back down so that, in the morning, you have to roll that rock uphill all over again.

If so, you probably sympathize with Sisyphus in Greek mythology who was punished by the Gods for daring to escape from the Underworld. Sisyphus was forced to roll a rock up a hill and watch it fall back down for all eternity.

You may sometimes want to echo Macbeth’s sentiments: “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”

And yet:

There is a school in Tiffin, Ohio named Heidelberg University, enrollment 1200 that every year plays a football game against the University of Mount Union in Alliance, Ohio with an enrollment of 2200.

Between 2004 and 2007, Heidelberg had been outscored, 187-0, in just three games played against Mount Union. Three games!

But in 2007, Heidelberg had something to celebrate. They became the only team in their conference to score points against Mount Union’s first-team defense. The score of that 2007 game? 62-3.

Since that “triumph,” the scores against Mount Union have been getting marginally closer: 49-0, 44-14, 45-7.

According to a New York Times story about the team, as they prepared for the 2011 game, the players were euphoric. “Where else would you rather be?” wide receiver Mario Escalante shouted during practice.

“Nowhere but here!” his teammates yelled back.

On October 16th, Heidelberg lost 56-7.

Talk about rolling a rock up a hill for all eternity.

I was reminded of the movie Starman in which Jeff Bridges plays an alien from another planet marooned on earth. He is befriended by a woman who helps him rendezvous with a ship on its way to rescue him. During the journey, Bridges says to the woman, “Shall I tell you what I admire most about your species? You are at your best when things are at there worst.”

I heard a classical violinist speaking the other day about his incessant pursuit of perfection. He likened his pursuit to climbing a series of staircases. When he reaches the top step of one staircase, he noted, he is merely at the bottom step of the next. And yet he keeps rolling his rock.

In their book “Great By Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck---Why Some Thrive Despite Them All,” Jim Collins  and Morten T. Hansen note that, when we flip a coin, the ratio of heads to tails evens out over time, but that we have to be willing to be resilient enough to endure the bad luck long enough to eventually get to the good luck. As they note, “Luck favors the persistent, but you can persist only if you survive.”

Or, as William Faulkner said so eloquently in his 1950 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail.”

Finally, Michael Lewis, author of several books, two of which have been made into movies (“The Blind Slide” and “Moneyball”) has a new book out called “Boomerang” about the current financial crisis.

While most of the book presents a fairly pessimistic view of the future, Lewis concludes the book by noting that, “As idiotic as optimism can sometimes seem, it has a weird habit of paying off.”

We just have to keep on rolling our rocks.

QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? LJBARKAN@THEPIVOTALFACTOR.COM

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Reprinted by permission of the author, Larry Barkan http://www.larrybarkan.com