Anyone who has worked hard and tried to achieve a serious goal knows that the road to achievement is not always easy. There are ups and downs, and people who want to succeed sometimes wonder if it’s time to give up. One of the things I hear a lot from self-help gurus and motivational speakers is that you shouldn’t give up. People say, “Don’t give up on your dreams,” don’t give up, don’t give up.
This tip is helpful. But what does it really mean to not give up, and how do we know when it’s time to keep trying or give up? When you are facing difficult times in your life, emotions take over you, you may not see a clear way to move on. Someone telling you not to give up when you’re in emotional pain and feeling stuck can be comforting, but it could also be just as good as telling someone not to get angry when they’re already furious. It helps you understand when to give up and when not to give up. Sometimes healing requires that we understand the causes of the disease and not just the symptoms of it. By understanding when to give up and when not to give up, you’ll handle the situation when things aren’t going well and better position yourself to move forward. Know when to give up and when not to give up. This article shares 5 wrong reasons to give up.
1. Quit because you are not seeing results
In all our efforts we hope to see results. That’s just human nature. Sometimes we do favors for people hoping they will do the same for us. When we spend money and buy something, we expect it to work as it should. In many areas of our lives we expect immediate results. This sometimes makes us want immediate results when we try to be successful. Success works differently. Sometimes it may not be as simple as we would like it to be. Just like a farmer who works hard to plant seeds and nurture them until harvest, sometimes we may not see immediate results when trying to achieve a specific goal. Therefore, we must be comfortable working without seeing immediate results, knowing that we will reap the rewards much later, when harvest time comes. Giving up on your dreams because you don’t see immediate results can sometimes set you back in terms of goal achievement.
2. Giving up because you failed too many times
As human beings, we are naturally programmed to learn from experience. Research shows that negative experiences tend to stick with us much longer than positive experiences. Our emotions are also associated with the experiences we receive from the environment. Since we were little we experiment and put our fingers in lit candles testing if the fire burns us. Once we are burned we do not want to put our fingers in the fire again because experience has taught us that fire burns. After this we begin to associate fire with pain. When we see fire we avoid it as much as we can. This way of learning from experience and using avoidance helps us survive better.
The same thing happens once we are adults and try to achieve our goals. As much as we want to avoid failure, the truth is that sometimes we do fail and begin to fear taking risks. This makes it difficult for us to live to our true potential and achieve our goals. Past failures have the potential to affect us psychologically and cause us not to act to avoid the pain associated with failure.
This can be one of the worst reasons to give up on your goal because past failures don’t usually reflect future performance. Many people who are successful now have failed many times in the past, including Sylvester Stallone.
3. Quit because you don’t believe in yourself
Self-confidence affects performance on how to achieve your goals. Even in sports, an athlete who is self-confident always tends to perform better than one who lacks self-confidence. The same is true of our attempts to achieve our goals. When we believe in our abilities, we have more faith and courage to take the necessary steps to achieve our goals. When we lack self-confidence, we get discouraged and give up at the first obstacle we encounter. We give up not because we are not capable or failing, but because we simply do not believe in ourselves and we do not believe that we can achieve our goals. This is the wrong reason to give up on your goals because it is based on self-perception rather than reality. The reality is that we are all capable of achieving what we set out to do if we put in enough effort and time.
4. Quitting because you are too lazy to do hard work
Sometimes giving up is not so much about whether or not we will succeed as it is about giving up because we are afraid of the hard work we have to do before we can achieve our goals. The exercise provides a very good example of how we sometimes give up doing what we know can really work. When you eat right and exercise, you are guaranteed to see positive results; however, it takes a lot of work to exercise and be disciplined with your diet. So while you can be sure of the results you’ll get when you eat right and exercise, you may consciously or unconsciously give this up just because doing this is hard work.
5. Quitting because other people tell you to give up
Sometimes people may not support you. Perhaps your spouse is not supportive or others say that you will fail. Your vision may only be visible to you and no one else. When you tell other people about your dream, they may give you many reasons why you won’t succeed.
Giving up on your goal or dream because other people tell you so may be the worst thing to do because your vision may not seem practical to many people. Only you know how you feel and how strong your passion is. Few people believed that humans could fly until the Wright brothers invented an airplane. Most people would be cynical when you say you can travel around the world from Africa to the US in less than 3 hours, but research is currently underway to create the world’s fastest plane. What other people think is impossible may be very possible for you. So don’t give up on your dreams just because other people have given you hundreds of reasons why what you’re trying to achieve won’t work. There may be many other ways to achieve your goals that would not be apparent to you until you are crazy enough to attempt what others think is impossible.
