One of the most common pieces of business advice you will see across social media and the popular business press is this: Never, ever, give up.
This advice comes in many different guises such as ‘persistence pays’, ‘consistency is key’ and ‘all you have to do is get up one more time than you’re knocked down’ – but the essence is ‘just keep going and you’ll get there in the end’.
And you know what – it’s 100% true. There is no doubt that resilience, persistence, consistency, doggedness or whatever else you want to call it will get you ’there’ in the end.
But as with all positives there are a few negatives as well…
Firstly there’s the personal cost. Whether it’s sleepless nights, stress, lack of time with your family (and the irreversible consequences of that) burnout and/or serious mental health issues it is highly likely there will be a considerable personal cost to ‘just keeping going’. If you’re comfortable that the outcome of getting ‘there’ justifies the cost then go for it – but don’t go fooling yourself into thinking that there’s no cost at all. Weigh it up honestly – and make sure it’s worth it.
Secondly ‘there’ (the place you’re aiming for) will change over time. Just as you don’t listen to the same music or wear the same fashion as you did at 16 (do you?!) your business and life goals will change. So as you set off on your five year plan to grow a multimillion pound app and work 24/7 to make it happen, just realise that in five years time you might get ‘there’ only to realise that it’s not as fulfilling as you thought it was going to be. The world is littered with rich and successful yet thoroughly disillusioned entrepreneurs.
And as unbelievable as it sounds there will also come a time when chasing goals and not giving up gets boring. Why? Because an important aspect of taking on a challenge is that there’s part of you that doesn’t know whether you can make it – and you get a massive high out of proving that you can do it. But if you’ve got to the stage where you’ve never ever given up, where you’ve succeeded at virtually everything you’ve tried, do you really think taking on yet another goal is just as exciting? It isn’t – it’s just a repeat of the same process but with a different goal – and the high of achievement becomes less and less every time because there is no surprise about the outcome any more.
And finally – if you never give up and you are always chasing goals when and where does that end? Do you keep chasing until the day you die? Do you never get to the stage where you are content with your lot in life and you enjoy the fruits of your labour? In psychological terms this would be called either addiction or possibly mania. Is that really where you want to get to in your life?
So just recognise that ‘never give up’ is a strategy in life the same as any other. It’s a powerful tool that should be deployed when it’s useful to you, but it should be used sparingly otherwise it will drive you to places that you no longer want to go and at a huge and often irreversible personal cost. There are no prizes worth having for being unstoppable, ill, lonely and miserable.
