Leading article: The trying game
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The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.You would think that Roger Ebert churned out enough words in the course of his professional life without the need to add more on the side. After all, the Pulitzer-prize winning film critic writes movie reviews that are syndicated to more than 200 newspapers worldwide every week. Then there are his 15 books and his Emmy-nominated TV programmes. And yet most weeks since the New Yorker magazine launched a regular cartoon caption contest some years back, Mr Ebert has diligently penned an unpaid offering and sent it in. Without success. Until now. Last week his 107th effort was chosen by America's venerated weekly magazine as its winner.
This testament to the virtue of persistence only goes to prove that, as another significant American – Thomas Edison, the inventor of the light bulb – said, genius is 1 per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration. His fellow countrymen might like to think of this as a peculiarly American virtue; after all it was the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson who held that to be a champ, you have to believe in yourself when nobody else will. Not so. These islands were home to a much earlier icon of perseverance, Robert the Bruce, the original spider man.
Success, as Sir Winston Churchill rather more elegantly put it, is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
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