Thinking of Quitting? Don't Stop Before You're Proud

Summary

One of the most complex decisions is quitting a project you have invested much time, capital, and effort in. Because of the sunk cost fallacy, it becomes easy to overestimate the potential of an idea that may have been dead in the water from day one. This video is about when I started coaching an entrepreneur who was on the verge of quitting a business for which he had fought tooth and nail. What happened in the end might surprise you.

Transcript

Are you thinking about quitting? If so, don't do it before you watch this video, let's get to it.

Hey, I'm Leon Castillo, founder of Selfmastered, a high performance training company that helps entrepreneurs scale their businesses by solving their silent bottleneck, their own performance, will transform the unproductive overwhelm and focus entrepreneurs into laser focused business athletes that can achieve in one day, what they previously achieved in one week.

So today, I want to talk about one of the hardest conversation I had when we first started training people internationally. And this is about when to know if the right move is to play. And for how long should you persist on doing something. And this is probably one of the hardest things to do, knowing how to stop and knowing when to persist and discount because I had a conversation with an entrepreneur that was wickedly smart, he had unrelentless work ethic had a past track record of successes, but he was having a very difficult time building his company.

In fact, he had raised money about 12 months before he was running out of it, you know, to raise a new funding round, and he just didn't feel he was having the results he deserved based on all the effort he was putting in. And he was doing all the right things. He was building the product marketing himself and marketing the company, touching the right doors, talking to the right people, but things just did not take like and that's when he came to us. And in one of those sessions that we had after we trained him shouldn't be a question that really left me pondering for several weeks in it was how can I know if I'm wasting like golden years, building the wrong company in that human like, break?

Because people hire me hire us hire some muscle to provide perspective advice, qualified help on issues. But sometimes when I see a few times, there's questions that really stop us in our tracks that we don't have an immediate answer to. And we need to find it together. And this is one of those moments.

And at that time, I could totally see where he was coming from right, smart, hardworking, doing the right thing, having no results. Why is that? Of course, there were a few things that were missing, but he just didn't see the fruits of his labor. And the reply I provided to him was inherently philosophical, which is the one that I want to share with you today. Which is, first of all, there's no way of knowing what is the right company to build, or what is the right career to pursue, and what is the right person to marry. You cannot know that. And no one There's one special person for each person.

That's just not how I see life, I believe that you care about the things you nurture. So it's really about developing a story together, together with your career with your business and your personal life. But in the case of businesses, you don't know if the business you decide to build is the one that maximizes your abilities provide the most intrinsic motivation and serves the longest amount of people, you cannot know that when you set yourself for this new business. So the answer to this riddle is found through effort and specifically through price.

Why do I say this because we humans create meaning out of experiences, especially if those experiences are painful, or hurtful, provide resistance, and is the overcoming of those challenges where those challenges might be? What creates meaning. And that meaning eventually gets interwoven into the narrative that we create for our lives. So without that struggle, there's no life, or at least there's no narrative that supports a happy life.

So you need to struggle. And the only way of making a struggle meaningful is by no folding back when facing, because it is very easy to convince yourself that you've done enough that you've done what you needed to do, that there's not much more you could be doing to solve a specific situation. But oftentimes, that isn't true. There's always reserve the Navy SEALs least by the 40% rule, when you think you cannot go further there are only 40% Because the body will carry way more damaged undermine what like to withstand.

So this same mental model can be applied to business if you feel Do you have exhausted all of your options, if you go to bed at midnight and wake up at 5am Thinking about the same thing and not knowing how to solve it for several months in a row then maybe you are trying to solve the wrong problem for yourself. But if you do not do this, if you have asked your effort if you convince yourself the spending season so social media is the modern way intrapreneurship is done if for whatever reason you shy away from the necessary work that needs to get done, then your experiment is not complete enough. Life, the only way of advancing is by sequentialized experiments is by testing hypothesis is by moving forward, and the only way of moving forward with poise, knowing what you're doing is essentially making sure that you validate all of your hypothesis because half assing your way through life or through business or through your relationship without ever being committed to making them work, is a surefire way of avoiding the necessary struggle that provides meaning to our life.

So in the case of business, when I told this gentleman was, if you truly feel there's not much more you could be doing, give yourself three months, one month later, situation was totally different, was raised fund revenue was up, new team members came, but this was because he's something clicked inside of him.

He knew there was a hidden well of motivation that he could harness to accelerate his performance. So this is the the idea that I want to discuss today is you can never know if you're building the right thing, because this is an infinite amount of options out there that you always know if you are doing everything you can to make the current thing work. And in a world where one of the rarest character traits is courage, which fosters resilience and persistence. Being able to remain at the thing is most probably the key defining factor in getting what you want.

So I hope this was not too rambley or whatever. But I just want to share this with you because I think it's interesting to think of life as some sort of narrative that you create, the more purposeful your struggle is, the more satisfying your life will be.