Don’t You DARE QUIT!

There’s no hidden or deeper story to this one. Don’t you dare quit on yourself. Or on your goals and ambitions. Unless you plan to make a habit of where you are in your life.

People too quickly and too easily succumb to circumstances. They immediately will push to make excuses why they can’t do something. Because you weren’t born to wealth. You didn’t go to a choice college or get that job on Wall Street or Silicon Valley. You can learn and do anything. If you’re willing to put in the work. There’s some personal and life philosophies though you need to adjust if you ever want to change your circumstances though.

Change Your Philosophies
The most significant philosophies to change is time, and your perspective on failure. And a deep understanding of true failure.

If you truly fail at something it’s because you gave up. The worst type of failure I think you can ever experience is when you quit on something you could have really accomplished, but you were too soft on yourself to actually put in the work. Because when it got hard, it was easier for you to give up than suck it up. And with true failure, when you were truly capable, I think comes great regret. And 40 years from now, I think regret is the one thing that simply just wears people down in the long run. You need to do what you will regret least at 90 years old. Jeff Bezos of Amazon probably worded this regret best:

“I call it a regret-minimalization frameworks, I projected myself into my 80s and asked what regrets I had about my life. And I realized that, at 80, I probably wouldn’t even remember all the things that seemed so important right then, like forgoing the end-of-year Wall Street bonus. But I would definitely remember that I’d ignored the emergence of the Internet just as it was happening and tell myself I’d been a fool.”

Your philosophy on failure needs to differentiate failure vs quitting. I’ve failed at many things. Projects failed. Failed relationships. Failed business ideas. But the difference is when I failed, I stopped, re-calibrated, re-loaded, and went again. I didn’t fail. I learned. I grew a new skill set for my next success. True failure would have been hitting that road block, throwing in the towel to just go sit in a cubicle for the next 40 years. Shift that perspective immediately.

The next philosophy I think critical to change is time. And learn how to push and be patient equally. That is one mentality I see as a common trait of the ultra successful. Elon Musk is a great example of this. He is very well documented expecting an incredibly high work ethic from himself and his team. He’s not afraid to push to a limit and right through it. On the inverse, he’s extremely patient. The newly released Telsa Model 3 was part of Musk’s grand master plan. A car that was released in 2017 was part of the plan for a company launched in 2003. That is patience. Most of us in Elon’s shoes would have been frustrated, fired and re-hired everyone twice over to develop an affordable mass market electric car sooner. The same applies to Musk and SpaceX. Jeff Bezos wrote his business plan for Amazon in 1994 with 20 products lines he felt would retail well online and eventually launched with just his top 5. His business plan was far more robust than 5 product lines, but he needed to be patient to achieve long term success.

Time is your biggest asset. If you have the patience to go along with the drive. If you don’t quit and give up as soon as your goal is missed the first time around.

No one is stopping you but you. You are your own best advocate. But you’re also your own worst enemy. You hold yourself back more than anyone else ever will. Guaranteed. Learn how to believe in yourself again and shut down the internal dialogue that you may fail or that you can’t do it. Life is simple. Business is simple. That doesn’t mean it’s easy. In it’s simplest form to succeed at anything in life:

1 — Get started
2 — Stay steady
3 — Don’t quit

That’s it. This universal principle holds true in everything. A lot of people are really good at step 1, but forget about step 2, and 3. Especially step 3.

Go and do.

-N