On Giving Up
When is it time to admit you can’t achieve your goals?
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We are all the heroes of our own stories. We all want to believe that we can achieve our goals if we work hard, stay focused and don’t give up. It is hard to accept that someone else might achieve goals that we cannot.
At the same time, as leaders we are constantly given goals that range from unreasonable to impossible. Competition in business is fierce, and to win you need to achieve goals that other leaders and companies cannot. That drive to win becomes a mandate, and that mandate is unforgiving.
Not everyone can achieve such aggressive goals. If they could, then those goals would be meaningless as every company would achieve them. Instead, achievement of these aggressive goals becomes the difference between success and failure, between winning and losing.
The reality is that we will fail to achieve our ambitious goals more often than not.
Failure is not an easy thing to deal with, and it’s easy to avoid admitting that we are on a path to failure. Whether it’s a quarterly revenue target, a customer satisfaction goal or product delivery plan it’s likely you can see failure coming long before it arrives. The question is not whether you will fail, it’s what you do when you realize you are on the path to failure?
It sounds like giving up to stop pursuing a goal. If you are halfway through the quarter and already thinking that you won’t achieve the goal, it can feel like you're not pushing hard enough. That you aren’t doing everything you can do.
Sometimes that’s true, but sometimes pushing hard towards a goal that you know is out of reach is a waste of time. If you are halfway through your quarter and there is no way to achieve your goal, giving up on it might be the right choice. You can pivot to focusing on why you couldn’t achieve the goal and make changes right now. That is a lot better than waiting another six weeks, missing your goal and then making changes.
Another way to think about this is a choice: Is it more important to push towards an out of reach goal now, or improve your chances of hitting the next goal? Should you sacrifice everything for this quarter, or focus on the following quarter? What is more important, now or the future?
When you think of it like that, then abandoning a goal is not giving up but investing in the future. In fact, giving up is the smart move as it means you are more likely to find future success. Pursuing goals, no matter what, is not always an inspiring display of determination. Sometimes it’s a mistake.
That doesn’t mean you should give up whenever things get hard. Making the decision of when to push harder, and when to give up, is one of the hardest leadership decisions to make. It’s one that favors experience, and that experience is gained by making the wrong decisions.
So, when faced with a goal that is becoming impossible to attain you should stop and consider your options. Is continuing to pursue the goal worth it? Or should you admit failure and focus on fixing whatever held you back? Be thoughtful and rigorous in that decision.
Giving up is not the same as losing, and in fact it might be the path to success.
For more on Mental Health, see:
The Dip and Quit are good books about this topic.