When Is The Right Time To Give Up On Something?

I have been asked this question a few times; it pops up in podcast Q&As occasionally. It always twists my heart in my chest. It feels so sad, like watching the last fraying strings of hope give way within someone, watching them fold up their dreams and lock them away and go back to what they were doing before with crestfallen shoulders.

But thinking about this question, I realised that it’s not actually a distressingly sad one – at least, it doesn’t have to be. In my business I have given up on way more things that didn’t work than I have followed through on things that did, both at the early idea stage and the “it’s launched but no one is interested” stage. I give up on things all the time, and don’t feel particularly sad about it.

Let’s time travel back to this time last year, when I had launched a mastermind programme. I had thrown all my eggs into the basket of this programme, was counting on it making up the vast majority of my income that year and therefore hadn’t planned much else to do instead. It felt like an up-levelling for me, a price point far higher than anything I’d done before and working with businesses at a stage more advanced than I had before. It was more than a programme, more even than the projected income – it was a signal to myself of what I was stepping into.

But no one wanted to buy it. I had a grand total of two enquiries, both of which quickly fizzled and ended up going with a different option (as was their right). It wasn’t my daydream of this launch, where the programme would be so overwhelmingly popular that I’d have two run TWO groups in order to keep up with demand. Every post I put out was like dropping a stone down a mine shaft, hearing it clang against the edges and drop into oblivion.

At first I panicked. This was my whole income for the year slipping through my fingers, and I felt powerless to know what to do. I wouldn’t say that I took the lack of interest personally exactly, but I felt foolish that I’d thought that I would be enough of a draw, that I could command this kind of investment. I felt like my business didn’t have as strong of a foundation as I thought it did. I stopped talking about the mastermind because it felt pointless, like I was some crazy lady banging a pan in the middle of the town square while everyone tried not to make eye contact.

So after a couple of weeks I decided to give up on it. It was a gradual process. At first I thought I had to stick with it to the bitter end, but once I starting thinking that I was allowed to just stop selling it, the thought of doing so gained momentum in my brain. It was feeling like a slog, like I was having to push, like I was going to have to convince people and that, even if the programme did book up, I would spend the next 12 months feeling like I’d made them do it and I wasn’t enough. There wasn’t a scenario where I could imagine it feeling good, so I gave up on it.

That was the most public thing I have ever given up on, the most obvious and huge “failure” I’ve ever had – and people probably would never even remember it happened if I didn’t keep using it as an example for things. I don’t mind talking about it because I’m glad it happened. I still made money that year, and not running the programme opened up doors for lots of different things I wouldn’t have otherwise done. There are other things I’ve given up on too – my computer is full of documents with half-baked course structures and ideas, and last year I wrote an 18,000 word book proposal that I’m no longer intending to pitch.

But back to the question: when is the right time to give up on something?

I don’t think there is a quantifiable “right time”. When I think about the things I’ve given up on, the one thing they all have in common is that I’ve given up on them once the excitement for it dies inside me. Sometimes that happens when I’ve written a paragraph and just think “nope I really don’t want to do this”, and sometimes that happens two weeks into a launch. If I lose the belief, then I know the product isn’t right. Because the opposite happens too! I sat on the idea for The Customer Kit for about a year; it wasn’t ever the right time to get to work on it but I also never stopped believing in it.

I would also say that sometimes you can feel it in the atmosphere of a launch. Like with my mastermind, there was just flatness. Sometimes you launch things and even though it’s not selling straight away there is still this feeling in the air, like you’re getting the vibrations of people reading the content and getting excited too. You’re getting enthusiastic comments and people sharing your posts and there’s an energy to it. If you’re not getting any of that then it’s just not landing, for whatever reason, with your audience, so I’d go back to the drawing board.

I also don’t think it’s as all or nothing as either doing it or giving up on it completely. Sometimes a launch is flat because you’ve pitched the copy wrong, or because it needs to be a 3 month commitment instead of 12, so these are things you can work on and re-launch at a different time. It might be that the thing you’re not excited about actually needs to be a part of something bigger, or broken into smaller parts, or be something completely different. Like me with that book proposal: I lost the excitement and belief about it being a book, because it’s probably going to be a better course.

There is this sense, maybe it’s the internet, maybe it’s socialised, that we should never stop pursuing our dreams – and that we should encourage others to do the same. “Never give up! You can do this! There’s always a way! If you can dream it you can do it!”. But actually, giving up on something that’s not working is a part of doing business, a part of doing life. Giving up on things makes room for better things. If it’s not working, if you’re not excited to make it work, if the belief isn’t there…then what’s the point? You are closing yourself off to other possibilities by persisting with something because you think you need to have “grit” or something. I would say that if you’re at a point where you’re wondering whether it’s time to give up on something, it’s probably time to give up on it.

…with one caveat. It depends on the thing you’re giving up on. So far I’ve talked about when to give up on a thing within your business, but what if what you want to give up on is your business itself? What if you’re thinking of giving up on the bigger dream?

Tread carefully here. It is one thing to say “this course isn’t working, I’ll do something else” and quite another to say “this business isn’t working, I must give up on my dream”. My advice here is to spend some time with what the dream actually is. How does the dream make you feel, how might your life be different with that dream having come to be? Is that still what you want? Does it still feel true?

If your answers are no, then imagine how you might feel if you did give up. I know there are goals and dreams I’ve given up on in the past and the moment of giving myself that permission to let go has felt freeing, as if I’d been living inside a heavy costume and it was suddenly lifted from my shoulders. If the idea of giving up on your dream feels like freedom, then that wasn’t your dream. And you can now build another one.

But if your answers are yes, then please don’t give up. If the dream is still alive inside you, still excites you, then it is not the right time to give up. You will need to find another way, perhaps sit in the discomfort of waiting for circumstances to change or reduce your expectations of when and how and where things will happen. Just please don’t tell yourself that your dreams are worth giving up on.

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