Persistence is important to achieve success, but giving up is also important. I’ve written about persistence before, so here I want to look at giving up.
Why is it essential? Why is it necessary to give up? Because it allows you to focus your energy on the few things that are truly important. By giving up, you:
- Stop unfruitful effort. What’s the point of spending your time and energy on something that doesn’t work? The more you spend your time and energy there, the more you waste your resources.
- Avoid spreading yourself too thin. There are probably many things that you want to achieve. But you can’t achieve everything you want. Your resources are limited so you need to choose and prioritize. If you try to do too many things at once you will end up achieving nothing.
- Reduce your stress. Pursuing too many things means giving yourself unnecessary pressure. Don’t let your ambition stop you from enjoying your life.
- Free up time for your loved ones. Don’t be so busy that you don’t have time for your loved ones. By giving up, you ease your burden and free up time to build meaningful relationships.
In essence, here is what you need to do:
Give up the less important things so that you can focus and persist on the few important ones.
Here are several tips to help you apply it:
1. Find what matters to you
You need a way to know whether or not something is important. That’s why you need to find what matters to you. What makes you feel fulfilled? What gives you inner satisfaction? Be persistent on things that matter to you and give up the others.
2. Assess your life every now and then
Even if you already find what matters to you, the busyness of life can obscure it. As a result, you might get distracted by superficial things. So find time to reflect on your life every now and then. Look at how your life is going. Are you staying true to what your heart is saying?
3. Learn to let go
You may know that you need to give up something, but it might not be easy to let it go. This is especially true if you already spend a lot of resources on it.
This is where the concept of sunk costs is helpful. Don’t get caught in sunk cost bias. The fact that you’ve spent your resources on the wrong thing doesn’t justify spending even more resources on it. Those resources are already spent. Now you need to find the best way to spend the resources that are left.
The concept of opportunity costs may also be helpful. Holding on the wrong thing means losing better opportunities. The more resources you spend on it, the more opportunities you lose.
4. Refocus your effort
Once you’ve given up the less important things, renew your focus and effort on the few important ones. Now that you are focused, you have a chance to make a real difference.
Photo by Japokskee
Giving up definitely has it’s place, although, at least in my experience it’s much easier to do than to actually continue with something worthwhile.
And I think that refocus point is important in that “giving up” isn’t really a sacrifice, it’s just a reallocation of priorities, and with the change you’ll be rewarded as you can enjoy activities more deliberately. 🙂
Hey Donald.
I think I will use this at this time. I will label what is not as fruitful as unfruitful effort, and then focus on the special concepts that come to mind. Special material will take care of covering up any effort missed in areas that are not as beneficial.
Spreading myself thin has never brought about good results.
I would like to implement this concept. Thanks for reminding me of it.
It’s great that you wrote about giving up, as it’s an underrated skill.
I think we often have problems with giving up because once we get invested in one direction, then whatever we do sort of needs to be consistent with that. But if you can fight with this need and your Ego, you can actually get a lot more productive.
Eduard
David,
Yes, giving up here is a mean to reallocate your priorities. The difficulty is in letting go something that you also consider worthwhile. It isn’t easy to choose only a few out of several good options.
Armen,
Glad you find it useful. I learn these lessons firsthand. Just like you, I also find that spreading myself too thin is a good way not to achieve anything valuable.
Eduard,
I like the way you describe this problem. Giving up is indeed a skill because – as you said – you must fight your ego to be able to do it. That isn’t easy.
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Donald, I totally agree with you on the point about sunk costs and opportunity costs. We often get trapped in the rat race because of what we’ve done in the past (studying, looking for a job, etc) and often do the same thing because we think it’d be such a waste if we go on a new journey again.
However, if we don’t muster up our courage and give up things that do not really matter to us and search for things that DO matter, we’d just be slaves to our own cowardice. Again, it’s not easy to get out of the comfort zone and try finding a new path in our life again. But if we don’t, we just have to accept our current situations (however good/bad it may be) and not complain about it.
So, similar to your point about finding what matters, I really think we should take the time to find the ambitious and courageous child in us that used to have big dreams; and really go for those dreams. A good way I have in mind is to write down all the dreams you had/have on a piece of paper and review that. It might just give you that sudden realization that what you’re doing might not be what you really want to hold on to. Maybe it’s time to move on.
Thanks for this wonderful post!
Letting go of the right things definitely is a skill.
I think asking the questions, “what do you want to accomplish?” and “is it effective?” help guide when to quit and when to stick.
I also think it sometimes can be extremely confused for adolescents like me to find out what I really want to go after and without actually carrying out the plan we never know whether it is effective or not.
[…] as with everything else, you have to pay the price. What’s the price of freedom? You have to learn to give up. Give up that false, naive, comfortable thought that you have the freedom. If you have doubt as […]
[…] Latumahina presents The Importance of Giving Up posted at Life […]
Ken,
That’s a good idea. Often there are so many things in our mind that we forget the big, courageous dreams we have in us.
J.D.,
Simple questions like what you shared are really helpful to remind us to do the right thing. They can prevent us from going off track.
While I don’t think you should ever give up if victory is within your grasp, giving up when you KNOW you can’t succeed is always an intelligent approach. Why pour effort into something when there’s no output to reward you back?
Travis,
Yes, that’s an intelligent approach. Unfortunately, sunk cost bias often tricks people into continuing their unfruitful effort.
It’s very important for you, for your productivity, to know when to let go a project, when you feel that it is not working (the way you wanted to work, or not working at all), when you feel that one of your actions does not satisfy you. As you said, the time, effort, energy are waisted if you do not realize (or admit) in due time that the results are not satisfying.
Hi Donald,
I’m a freelance writer; one of my favorite articles was about knowing when to give up for your own good! I loved writing that article, because I got to interview psychologists, life coaches, etc about the power of letting go.
One of the most important things I realized was that we’re inundated with “persist to succeed!” messages, but not “know when to fold ’em” ones. It takes courage to change direction or jump tracks altogther (I’m mixing my metaphors here) — but it’s so important to recognize when things aren’t working.
Anyway, thanks for this; I’ve subscribed to your RSS feed 🙂
Laurie
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Helen,
Admitting is perhaps one of the biggest obstacles to giving up. Many people don’t want to admit that they’ve made a mistake. But making mistakes is actually normal because it’s part of the learning process.
Laurie,
That’s exactly what’s happening. I also like your point on courage. Courage is indeed essential. Thanks for stopping by 🙂
I agree with the premise of this article. Sometimes you just have to know when to throw in the towel, you know? People are so enveloped in an idea that they started, and they don’t want to give it up. If something doesn’t work for you, then change it. You don’t have to suffer by sticking with it, you know?
Thanks,
Josh Lipovetsky.
though giving up is indeed never an easy task, it is sometimes necessary. in life, we need to prioritize some times and we need to weigh things out. sometimes in giving up, we may earn something worthy and thus, leads us to success.
nice post! keep it up
THank you for this topic
I am kindly asking to a previous permission to translate this article into portuguese and publish it on my blog.
Thank you very much in advance for your respounce.
Jorge Purgly