Sometimes in life, you can prepare, have the right timing, work hard, and still fail. What do you do when this happens? How do you find the will to go on? Should you quit and find something else to do? These are all valid questions that we are going to work through. When you try your best and don't succeed, you need to know that it is possible and not the end of the world. The thing that makes success valuable is that it's never guaranteed. It does not matter if you are trying to get good grades, run a successful business, or become the next president of the United States. Success has to be earned, and even when you feel like you have made it, life will not always hand over what you want. By the end of this read you will know how to stay focused.
Sometimes in life, you can prepare, have the right timing, work hard, and still fail. What do you do when this happens? How do you find the will to go on? Should you quit and find something else to do?
When You Try Your Best and You Don't Succeed - When to Quit
There is a time to quit. The internet is full of articles of people saying that you should never quit. The idea that quitting is always wrong is false. How many deaths could have been avoided if generals would have abandoned one battle early? How could many investment disasters have been avoided if people would have got out on day earlier? There is always a time to quit. The trouble is knowing when. Right after the feeling hits you when you try your best and don't succeed, don't make any choices. Never make an important decision in a valley.
Don't Be a Dream Hopper
You want to avoid being a dream hopper at all costs. These people stick with nothing. They are always looking for the next thing. These are the people who were trying to get you to join their MLM, and then the next week they were cryptocurrency experts. Every time you talk to them, they have a different thing.
The dream hopper is in love with the novelty of anything new. Novelty is the reason social media has become so popular. You never know what you are going to see each time you go on social media. It's attractive to people who love new things.
The problem with being a dream hopper is that you never will stay with anything long enough to succeed. People who are good at anything have gotten that way from practice. They have found their thing and stuck with that one thing. They get through the bumps an bruises of life until they succeed.
Too Soft for Adversity
Some people are too soft for adversity, so they try and run from problems. Not all issues can be run from though. You have to face them head to head and not back down. Being too soft for adversity is not about novelty; it's about expecting life to be easy.
Life is not going to be, and you don't want it to be. No one wants to suffer or get beat down, but without struggle, you cannot be strengthened. Think about the process of building muscle. You can't get stronger lifting light weights that are easy for you. The only way to get stronger is to lift weights that challenge your muscles.
Adversity does the same thing for us. When you try to run from adversity, it shows up wherever you are until you can pass the test. The misfortunes you think are here to break you are here to mold you into something more significant.
Holding On Way Too Long
The flip side of all this is the person who loves adversity and failure too much. The goal is to succeed not to fail. Failing can help you get to success, but you can't lose sight of the goal. You can hold on to something for too long because you refuse to face the realities of life.
Sometimes you're not able to accomplish because you don't have the skill to, the timing is off, you have not prepared right, you're team is missing the right pieces or many other reasons. Knowing the difference between when to hold on and when to let go is hard.
On the one hand, most success comes after massive failures. A big failure can be a sign that it's time to be done, but it can also be a sign that you're almost there. There is no way to know for sure.
When You Try Your Best and You Don't Succeed - When to Stick
Seek Progress
If you are going to stick anything out, you should see progress. Not fake growth or the type you make up in your head so you can keep going. You need to have some form of metrics that you track. Numbers never lie, and over time, they can tell you a story.
Let's say you have a website that you are thinking of quitting. If you look at the metrics for daily traffic over the last three months, you may notice that it's trending upward. That does not mean that you should automatically keep going.
What it does mean is that you're moving in the right direction. That counts for something. If you continue to move in the direction you are moving, you will eventually get to where you want to be. It may take 20 years, but that may be well worth it to you.
Be Honest With Yourself
As I stated above, it's effortless to lie to yourself here. Things are never as good or as bad as you think they are. Remove the emotion from the situation. It's also essential that you remove the amount of time and work you put in because that can blind you. The time has passed, and you can't get it back. Putting five years of work does not mean you should put five more in. It is an opportunity to potentially not waste five more years.
Being honest with yourself is key to knowing when to stick. When you let the world slow down, and you take some time to meditate on it, you will know what to do. Your logic and your emotion would be lead to the right path if you used together.
Can You Be The Best?
One thing you need to consider in anything you do is if you can be the best at it. People are the best rewarded with significantly more. Think about the best NBA player compared to the 50th best NBA player. They both make a lot, but the best make more.
The best make the most in all fields. Your goal should be to work on things where you can be the best at it. If not the best in the world, the best in your town or city. People don't look for the 5th best pizza place in the city. They go straight for the number one spot in the city. We are attracted to the best. If you can be in the running for the best, you should stick it out.
When You Try Your Best and You Don't Succeed - When to Change
You Are Close But...
We were in this position with Habit Stacker for a while. People liked our direction, but they had suggestions for improvements. When you're in this position, it means that success won't come your way unless you male some changes.
The only way you can get to know if you are here is if you continuously seek feedback. Too many people work on projects in a silo. You end up thinking that everything you do is incredible when you work this way. You should always make your work as public as possible so it can receive the feedback it needs to succeed.When it comes to figuring out how to stay focused, feedback is a great way to do this.
Drop Your Ego and Listen
To be able to take the feedback, you have to drop your ego. You must admit that there are other people out there that know more than and that others can bring value to the table.
One of the big reasons people fail to get any feedback is because any criticism crushes them. They only want to be around people who are going to tell them great things. That is the difference between the amateur and the pro. The novice needs positive feedback to grow, but the pro needs the truth to grow.
Your ego is your worst enemy when it comes to listening to others. It took me years of being an entrepreneur to understand this. You have to let go of what you want to do and listen to your way to the right path.
Change - Test - Repeat
Now the customer is not always right. Sometimes customers have no idea what they want. If you are going to drop your ego and listen, know that they can be wrong. How do you protect yourself against this? You test everything!
Decide on a change, find a way to test it, and then repeat the process. You have to continually be asking yourself what the easiest way to check all of this is. If you can find a way to run a simple test that does not cost money, that would be ideal. What you don't to do is pour all of your resources into one change you are not sure will work.
How to Build Habits That Ensure Success
When it comes down to it. Success is about habits. If you want to change your life you have to change the things you do daily. Your habits can't remain the same day to day but magically produce different results. When you try your best and don't succeed, keep going back to your habits.
Habit Stacker allows you to track your habits and know if you are getting things done every day. Add any habits that you want to track, and each day, you will have a routine board set up that you can go through. If your habits are late, you will get a notification. If you don't do it at all, a notification will be sent to your accountability partner. These small things are important paths when you need to know how to stay focused.