We’ve all heard hundreds of times that the secret of success in any field lies in being consistent and persistent, in never giving up and in carrying on when difficulties arise. Fall down, dust yourself off and get back up with the lesson learned. And it’s true: most successful people have had precisely those traits.
But as the saying goes, there’s nothing harder than knowing when it’s time to keep trying and when it’s time to throw in the towel. Put like that, it may sound a bit defeatist. Some might even think giving up isn’t for them, but we’re about to see how not giving up is sometimes the least intelligent thing you can do. In fact, in many cases, refusing to throw in the towel doesn’t lead you to success but to a painful failure that prevents future success.
See also: Hard truths about success
Why does the secret of success lie in giving up?
“Quitters never win and winners never quit.” The truth is that these metaphors, usually applied to sport, tend to be rather stupid when it comes to life and business.
In life, what you leave behind can matter more than what you’re chasing. If you’re in the middle of fighting for a goal and you notice you keep hitting a wall again and again, you have two options:
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Keep banging your head against it until you’re sick of it, until it costs you your health and your well-being.
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Drop it, and stay alive to use that energy to fight another war.
Don’t worry, I haven’t turned pessimist. You’ll understand perfectly if we apply this to romantic relationships.
Have you ever struggled to make a relationship work? Remember that uncertainty, that exhaustion, that helplessness.
In time you met someone else, you put in the effort and everything went smoothly. Why do you think that second relationship worked? Maybe because you did your part, of course. But above all, it was because you gave up on the previous relationship and were able to stay alive and keen to try again.
Some people, rather than being persistent and consistent, have slipped into stubbornness. And what they have is no longer persistence. It’s obsession.
It’s the same in business
There are people who have been very successful in a business because they knew when to give up on an earlier business idea.
There are people who have succeeded because they recognised that the time had come to leave a career that didn’t satisfy them.
Quitting, giving up and letting go is sometimes the bravest thing you can do
In fact, winners are winners because they’ve known when to quit many times over.
One of the main problems small entrepreneurs face in business is not knowing when it’s time to throw in the towel on a business that’s going nowhere. Despite the losses, they change strategy again and again while the debt grows, and they burn their energy on a business that ends up closing anyway.
See also: Rafa Nadal’s success applied to business
But how do you know when it’s time to give up or carry on?
Good question, and a hard one to answer. The truth is there are no general rules that everyone can apply to every kind of situation. But through reading, and through the success stories of many business people (and not only in the business world), I came to the conclusion that there is a way to tell when you should take one path and when you should choose another. You only have to answer this question.
What kind of tiredness do you feel?
I think we’ll all understand this perfectly once we identify the two kinds of tiredness there are.
1. Productive tiredness
This is the kind that leaves you exhausted when you get home or go to bed, but at the same time you feel you’ve done something productive, and you don’t mind feeling that kind of tiredness again the next day.
Let’s say this exhaustion reflects tiredness that has a purpose. And your positive outlook reflects that you’re heading in the right direction.
2. Empty tiredness
This is the kind that keeps you drained and without energy. It even changes your character. You just want it to be over. Your mind has become more negative than it should be. You can fool yourself, but you can’t fool a subconscious that knows you’re in a fight you’ll probably lose.
Clearly, the moment your physical and mental health is at stake, it’s time to give up and quit, even if there were a one-in-a-hundred chance that things would work out in the end. The risk of breaking your mental health outweighs the possible reward.
And this is where we have to be decisive when it comes to making a decision that leads us to quit.
If your partner has been bringing you more problems than joy for a long time, don’t fight it. Walk away.
If going to work has felt as hard as climbing Everest for a long time, leave as soon as you get the chance. As Michael Bloomberg put it, it must be miserable to get up every day to go and do something you don’t like, so stop doing it: could it really be any worse?
Of course, the rule also applies here that between having no job and having a bad job, you should choose the bad job, but keep looking for a way to improve and get ahead.
And it’s the same in business. If you can no longer see a way out, or the way out is very far off and you’re on the verge of a heart attack, quit and save your strength for another project, however much people tell you to keep trying because some billionaire got rich by not giving up and managed to dodge bullets while they were shooting at him. In 999 cases out of 1,000, you don’t dodge the bullet.
And although it may not seem so at first, this is a message full of optimism and positivity, because to succeed at anything you have to let go of many things, including the ones that aren’t leading you to success.
Featured image: Barrier at the end of Hodgson Lane by Stephen Craven, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
