I am generally pretty good at knowing when to give up, quit, iterate, pivot and restart. I try my best to distance my ego / emotions from decision making such that I make the soundest/clearest choice possible.
But every once in a while, I seriously question whether or not I am sitting on the cusp of something great and perhaps I am thinking of pulling the plug too quickly.
Surely you can empathize with this feeling.
Do I quit now? Or hold off for 2 more weeks?
Do I meet up with this person? Or is enough enough?
Learning to figure out whether or not I am on the “cusp” of something important/pivotal is, to me, an important skill. I think there are many things that I spend tons of time on, hoping they will work out one day, that I should have quit years ago. Those are often obvious in hindsight. It is easy to see blatant failures in the sense that projects fail, friendships fall apart, etc.
What are harder to see, for me, are those scenarios where you stop pursuing something and never really find out what “would have happened.”
This applies both to my professional and personal worlds. I look back on my years, and rarely do I ask myself…
What would have happened if I…continued going to the gym more? Practiced more basketball? Etc.
The what-if game could become a distracting rabbit-hole, one that leads to depressing thoughts of anxiety and regret. That is unhealthy. I do not really regret much in life, if anything at all, so that is not what I am trying to communicate in this essay.
What I am trying to say is that understanding / feeling out whether or not you are on the cusp of something important is a real and tangible skill…
Is it instinct? Is it gut?
Quitting is not a failure. Indeed, quitting slowly is a bigger failure than quitting quickly.
The sooner you get out of bad situations, the better (generally).
But when do you figure out if things are going to turn the corner? How close are we to the next chapter? How much longer do we have to hold on? Is the grind coming to an end?
We are all perhaps on the cusp of our next big adventure. It would be a shame to throw everything away for a lack of patience.
Patience, I am figuring, is becoming increasingly important in my life. Life tells you to hurry up…then wait.
It trains you to accelerate quickly. But then it tells you to learn to use your brakes.
That is what I am doing now. I am rushing through things, only to know that soon I will have to rush and wait at the same time. A weird concept…