Giving up is different than deciding to walk away from something and being intentional about it. There are times when our involvement in a situation has run its course and it’s appropriate to be done with that part of our life. Giving up is where we consciously stop working towards our goals.
It’s common for people to blame giving up on something out of their control failing. For example, when creating a business, people will say they tried and it failed. Failure doesn’t mean that it wasn’t meant to be; failure is a part of the deal! The reason why the business didn’t work is because the owner wasn’t willing to try again. Sometimes we think that giving up is the only option when things don’t turn out how we wish they would have.
Giving up is a completely normal, human thing to do. Working at our goals and making changes to reach them is something that takes a lot of time and energy. This brings us to the first reason why people give up, which is because they lack patience.
We live in a world of instant gratification. Fast food can be in your hand in just minutes, Netflix and other streaming services offer entertainment at any hour, somebody else can do your shopping and the grocery store for you to pick up, and Amazon Prime can deliver packages in a day!
None of these things are bad, they are really convenient! But, it is no wonder that it feels unnatural and uncomfortable for us to wait for results when working toward goals. Our brains need to make a lot of changes to learn new things and implement new habits when we work towards new goals. It takes repetition for change to be brought about and repetition means doing things over and over, which can feel tedious. We need to be resilient and sometimes that means trying something over and over before we get the expected outcome.
For example, every new year, without fail, I write the previous year when writing the date. It takes a lot of time and repetition to finally start consistently writing the correct year, because I had 365 days to pick up the habit of writing the previous year! Old habits die hard, so it is inevitable that it will take time for the implementation of new habits but that does not mean that we should give up!
Another reason why people give up is because they are not seeing progress. If we see no changes when we are working toward a goal we are much more likely to give up; change is hard and why would we make changes if we don’t see that they are benefitting us?
The thing is, progress can be tracked in a lot of different ways. Sometimes we give up because we aren’t progressing in one way that we wish we were, even if we are excelling in another area, because we aren’t tracking our progress in that area! Something that indicates success for a business owner is revenue. The problem with only tracking revenue is that it can take a long time to start earning money as an entrepreneur! There are other ways to track progress, such as knowledge gained, new resources, and where you are now vs. where you were when you started.
Many business owners have made a ton of progress but if the progress isn’t more money in the bank they feel like they are failing. Any kind of progress means that things are working and you’re getting closer to reaching your goal! It’s important to look at things from multiple perspectives.
Don’t give up! Trying multiple times is part of the deal, so don’t walk away the moment things look like they’re turning south.
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