These days, it’s common for people to feel like life is harder than ever – both personally and professionally speaking. Day-to-day challenges can seem exceedingly difficult, to say nothing of how insurmountable long-term goals can feel.

Roy Beck has known these feelings, and he has overcome them time and again with one key ingredient – perseverance. Tenacity can truly get you far in the world, and he is proof positive of that fact. This is true for a wide range of different reasons, all of which are worth a closer look. 

The Impact of NumbersUSA

NumbersUSA is an advocacy group that focuses on immigration reduction and Roy Beck is both the president and the founder. The organization began in 1996, after Beck capped off his decades-long successful career as a journalist.

Since its inception, NumbersUSA has grown into the largest grassroots organization of its type in the country. It counts among its members millions of people from all ways of life – including those who lean left, those on the right, those in the middle and more.

Especially given everything going on in the world right now, forming such a group may seem unthinkable to some. But for Roy Beck, it was inevitable because he learned about something very important at a young age:

Perseverance.

It’s something that dates back to his time on his high school football team. Most of the other players were bigger than he was. Stronger than he was. But what he lacked in physicality he made up for in perseverance.

It’s also something that served him well all throughout his journalism career. Over 30 years he received dozens of awards and achieved success at a number of different levels. But his own personal reaction would always be the same: he’d climbed this particular mountain, now it was time for him to go try something else to see what he could do. This is what inspired him to leave journalism and start NumbersUSA in the first place.

The Roy Beck Story

In a lot of ways, NumbersUSA is the culmination of Roy Beck’s career up to this point – although he didn’t necessarily realize it would play out that way when he began this journey.

After graduating from the esteemed University of Missouri School of Journalism, he became the first environmental-beat reporter in the country in the 1960s. He spent three decades in Washington, DC as a chief correspondent. Throughout that time he earned over two dozen awards, including those that celebrated his passion for the environment, his business acumen, his support of religion and more. 

He has also co-authored a number of important studies on ideas like sprawl. His works have been featured in magazines, academic journals, national newspapers, and more. One of his works on immigration issues that was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly was eventually selected by Encyclopedia Britannica as one of the more important works of the 1990s. 

It was in 1991 that Roy Beck became a full-time policy analyst on immigration. During this part of his career he wrote no less than four books on the topic, touching on ideas like ethics, public policy and the impact on the United States job market. He covered all of these topics as fairly and as accurately as he could.

Based on all that, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Roy Beck ended up founding a bi-partisan organization like NumbersUSA in 1996. He and his colleagues aimed to help carry out the immigration recommendations of two national commissions.

Yes, it’s safe to say that Roy Beck has been able to accomplish an incredible amount during his career from a professional perspective. He’s also made a positive impact wherever he could, too. In addition to his aforementioned works he also leads a successful yearly week-long trip for teens, where they build Habitat for Humanity homes for the elderly and poor.

All of this was possible because, no matter what, Roy Beck refuses to give up. No matter how long a journey appears to be, or how difficult a problem seems, he always moves in the same direction: forward. Indeed, perseverance has been a major contributing factor to everything he has been able to accomplish, and he firmly believes that the same can be true for all others out there, too.