When to give up?

J.K. Rowling needing help from the government, while writing Harry Potter.

Thomas Edison and his team, trying thousands of different materials, before eventually settling on tungsten filaments for the lightbulbs that created an  industrial empire. 

Albert Einstein, not finding work in physics, dreaming up his revolutionary ideas for physics in the Swiss patent office for example are the greatest examples of people not giving up that I know. 

What we rarely hear are the stories when the person should have just given up.

But these stories also exist. They’re just not as celebrated, although, perhaps they should be. 

The problem with persistence is that every decision you make to keep going faces a trade-off. On the one hand, by quitting too early and too often, you never get past the hard parts and into the areas where your effort may pay off.

The easy spaces in life, with guaranteed wins for little effort, are crowded. It’s only once you venture past this, where you need persistence, vision and drive, that you start seeing rewards. When things are easy, everyone is doing them, so you want to go where things are hard enough to make it worth your time.

On the other hand, failing to quit is a failure to learn. Sometimes your ideas and vision don’t match reality. What you’re trying to do isn’t going to work, staying stubbornly in the same direction can cost you much more than just pride.

I’ve been in a position multiple times in my life where things seem to not be working out, and I have to consider whether I should keep going or give up.

One of the biggest decisions for me was whether to keep working with creative developments almost 15 years ago. I had been trying to work my way into a sustainable income for myself for several years working part time, and it hadn’t worked out yet. After a particularly bad failure with a project I had worked on, I considered giving up altogether, trying out something new.

In the end, however, I decided to keep going. The twist was that this was only 2 years before I finally found the business model that would allow me to earn a full-time income, and I have ever since. 

In other cases however, persistence didn’t win out. I was insisting in a friendship for  nearly two years now, but after consecutive disruptions, abuse and manipulation, I wasn’t happy with how things was working out, so I gave up so I could have time to focus on the stress free relationship I have with the rest of the people in my life. 

Between these, there’s been a ton of moments where I’ve had to make judgement calls about whether or not to keep going, and the choice is rarely clear cut. Below, I’d like to outline the decision process I use for making the tough call to keep going or quit:

Decisions aren’t made in isolation. You’re always comparing doing something to doing something else. Even “do nothing” is something, since you’ll fill your time with watching television or hanging out with friends.

A good question, therefore, when you’re balancing whether or not to continue is if you have a clear idea of what you’d do instead. 

Sometimes a project is hitting a rough patch, but it’s still the best idea you have of how you’ll reach your goals. You just need to push through.

This was my reasoning when I decided to developing creative management . I couldn’t see anything else that was a better opportunity at the time, even though I was getting discouraged.

One mental tool I use a lot to stick to hard things is to predefine my commitment before starting. That way, I don’t depend on momentary frustrations to make big decisions to quit or continue, but a different rule of thumb.

This was my reasoning behind giving up the friendship couple weeks ago. I had started it lightly, like I do it to everyone else, opened myself in the same level, being honest, kind and patience, inclusive and understanding, trying to justify all the attitudes of the person to it’s hard past and traumatic experiences. I was optimistic that eventually the person would start showing small changes in our friendship. Since we had thousands of conversations about how unhappy it’s behavior has making me. So, after the third super honest conversation I had, I left with a specific commitment to go for one year. After that yearlong effort, I felt it wasn’t what I wanted. The amount of work required to make each one was relatively high (compared to my other relationships), the amounts of effort from the other part were way lower than I’d like and it was more like using me as a way to project everything you don’t like about yourself and make it look like my fault, than a friendship. 

In this case, however, I was fine with giving it up because I had tried it out everything I could for the period I was committed to. If I had been feeling this way at the six month mark, I probably would have pushed forward because six months didn’t feel like enough time.

Would my future self feel regret or relief? This is a hard question, since it depends on imagining your future emotions in a way that isn’t always possible. However, I do like this approach to evaluating big decisions because it makes use of my intuition (as opposed to just my rational mind, which may be wrong) as well as forces me to see above the momentary issues and focus on the end of the line.

If I feel like the future-me would regret the decision, I usually commit to it a little bit more. Pick a new moment in time (let’s say 6 more months of work) and push to that point and reevaluate everything again. 

In contrast, if I imagine future-me would feel like it’s a relief, that with more emotional distance I’d recognize that I was in a bad relationship, project, obsession or mindset, that’s probably a good reason to believe that giving up is good. Sometimes we get overly attached to our current plans and fear giving them up for the unknown. But if you expect future-you to feel relief about it, then you’re probably wise to give it up now.

Fatigue, anxiety and frustration have always put me in emotional states that make it hard to keep going. However, sometimes the problem is just a momentary emotion.

If whatever I am considering giving up is important, and I’ve invested a lot of time already, I strongly try to start with a brief break. A semester off work. A world break. Some days in Schwabmünchen to clear my head.

Once I get back to a more neutral mindset, I can reexamine my feelings and see if they want me to get back up and continue the old path, or if the distance reinforces my decision to give it all up.

Whatever I do, I recognize that there’s no perfect solution to these problems in life. I am gonna always make decisions under uncertainty. The choice is mine to make.