Letting the Cards Fall Where They Want — the Value of “Giving Up”

How do you feel about quitting?

A lot of us have been taught that we should just keep going, relentlessly continue to follow our path towards our goals and never give up.

I suppose a certain shame is associated with giving up; perhaps we fear people's judgment, those who might say that we are ”weak” for not carrying on.

Of course, "giving up" exists on many levels.

On a smaller scale perhaps we're simply afraid of — or unwilling to — disappoint the people in our immediate environment. We feel like they are depending on us.

On the bigger scale perhaps giving up suggests something like allowing your business to go into bankruptcy, complete with the financial and legal consequences that will follow you around for years and years.

Many years ago, when I was still working in the IT industry, one of my upline managers taught me something surprising. He said that sometimes we just have to "allow all the plates we are keeping juggling in the air to fall to the grounds and break."

Perhaps that sounds surprising — coming from a corporate manager — but the point he was trying to make was that we often have a great deal of fear that if we do something we perceive as "bad" there is no recovery from it.

He then pointed out that if something happened and we couldn't come in to work to finish some project — as a result of which some deadline was missed — it was not going to be the end of the world. The earth wasn't going to stop spinning, and most likely somebody would simply step in, take a look at the fallen pieces, pick them up and put them back together as best they could and life would go on.

This point could really be applied on a great many levels, because we often put undue pressure on ourselves by making the assumption that we are in some way indispensable, and that the world will not continue if we fail to do something we have committed to doing.

Of course this is not to suggest that it's a good idea to simply turn our back on our obligations in hopes that somebody else will deal with them, but it is designed to give us a bit of breathing room when we find ourselves in hopeless situations where we were essentially paddling the little "boats" known as our lives upstream and no matter how hard we paddle we're never going to get ahead.

Sometimes, things simply have to be allowed to fail!

On a personal level, this has been a lesson that has been quite difficult for me to learn. After all, I grew up with parents who had very high expectations, and who pretty much instilled in me from an early age that failure was not an acceptable option in life.

In fact I can remember my father saying at one point that failure was simply not a next thing that existed in our family.

Whereas I owe a lot of my natural tendency towards persistence to his words, I can emphatically say that there are a number of occasions on which I have persisted with doing something that should have been allowed to fail.

The thing about things being allowed to fail is that we often think of failure in the context of something that very clearly is going down the drain. It has no chance.

In truth, most of the time (when something should be allowed to fail) it's the marginal stuff — where we hang on month after month, year after year, making no gain whatsoever but at the same time also not falling any further behind, living in a sort of grey limbo land — that serves only to grind us down while we cling to the faint hope that maybe something in the world will change that allows us to get ahead a little bit.

Alas, we become a little bit cognitively blind because we don't see what we're doing as an actual failure because it's not really failing, but the way in which it is failing is that we could let it go and take up something else that would turn out much better for us.

It might sound to you like it would be silly to hang on to something that is not really offering us a chance of happiness or success, but we often end up staying with such things because it's at least familiar... even if it is not going well.

And that is when we have to find the courage to simply let it go; to let the proverbial cards fall where they want and give up.

It's not for everyone, of course. But it is good to be aware that sometimes the best option is not to keep trying.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2025.01.14 01:46 PST
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