In the summer of my junior year in college I took a job as a door-to-door salesman for the Fuller Brush Company. My mother had just lost a long battle with cancer, and I wanted to earn enough money to turn a photo of her into a painted portrait for my dad.

What I earned depended entirely on what I sold; there were no guarantees. Things went well at first, but then I hit a long bad streak. I couldn’t make a sale. What’s worse, some people were outright rude and literally slammed their door in my face.

I was on the verge of quitting, but something my father used to tell me over and over stopped me: "Where there’s a will, there’s a way; where there’s not, there’s an alibi." I had always resented that simplistic mantra, but suddenly I got it.

I realized that every meaningful opportunity in life would stay behind closed doors and never open unless I knocked on it. And beneath this simple insight was another: If I was to succeed in anything difficult, I had to muster the confidence and courage to plug away despite the certainty of frustrating and unpleasant experiences.

Well, I hung in there and knocked on enough doors to earn what I needed to buy the portrait. My dad was thrilled, and the painting now hangs next to another one of my dad in the lobby of the Joseph and Edna Josephson Institute of Ethics, the nonprofit organization I founded in their honor.

I’m so glad my dad taught me to persist and so grateful I learned that an important part of character is to just keep knocking.

This is Michael Josephson reminding you that character counts.