The Superpower of Giving Up

We are often told that we shouldn’t give up no matter the circumstances. This sounds good on paper and what society regularly preaches.

The problem however is when you don’t know when to give up. The advice to not give up is indeed a good one. After all, how can you make progress if you constantly give up along the way?

But there’s a hidden condition we usually don’t mention in this discussion and thus, everyone assumes it doesn’t exist and gives the wrong version of the advice.

Not giving up only makes sense if the process of your goal is the one that’s giving results or if the goal itself is a valuable goal.

To still not give up when results don’t appear or when you find out that the goal is not relevant to your life is considered poor decision making.

It’s simply not beneficial to you nor others.

For example, when you drove your car and you realized that route A is faster than route B but since you chose route B in the beginning, you considered driving route A as giving up. That’s just a lack of good sense.

While it’s easy to point it out in such a concrete example, things get a bit messy in the self-improvement world.

We are living in a world where virtue signaling is becoming increasingly trendy while effective results are ignored. Just because you are busy does not mean you're productive.

As such, giving up when truly necessary is a superpower these days.

If you found out that the book on communication isn’t that relevant to you since you know most of its content then give up reading. It’s that simple.

Not only does giving up in such a scenario help you save time, energy and resources but also removes the guilt of being ineffective.

The solution?

That being said, it’s also a good question to ask yourself how to gauge if you’re truly in the need of giving up.

After all, it can be confusing considering your mind has an incentive to trick you to continue playing video games instead for example.

But here’s the clarity pill: when you give up something, you are giving it up for the sake of a good possibility of a higher benefit.

In other words, giving up only makes sense if there exists a loss of sunk cost and opportunity cost correlating it.

While sunk cost or opportunity cost may be obvious, some projects or goals take a few months and if you already know it’s mostly going to be a failure, it’s better to give up early and reinvest that time, money and resources in another direction.

Imagine investing in a field for four years of undergraduate when you know it’s clearly not what you desire.

Make a change today and try listing out things whether it’s as minor as a small change in your room to a career change that you are too afraid to give up.

Even if you don’t change now, acknowledging it itself is a step ahead than being clueless.

Sometimes giving up itself is an act of courage while sticking to familiarity and comfort zone is adhering to cowardice.