What is the Right time to give up upon a failed idea and start afresh?
We all face obstacles in the pursuit of our goals, be it professional or personal. We think we’re on the right track but often realise we’ve chosen the wrong approach. Despite our enthusiasm and hard work, our support system disintegrates when we need it the most. We’re just about to make significant progress when we run out of time or funding. Tenacious as we may be, we all have our breaking points—that moment when the potential rewards stop justifying the effort. Usually, that’s the hump that separates your best shot and your best reality. If you didn’t set smart goals, you may have set yourself up for failure.
How can you possibly make something happen if you don’t know exactly what you want, or didn’t really believe you could do it? Are you really willing to walk away when you didn’t give yourself every opportunity to succeed? Sometimes giving up is actually a good thing. Perhaps you set a completely unrealistic goal and its pursuit is filling you with a constant set of inadequacy and anxiety. Or maybe the goal isn’t in you or your family’s best interest, and it’s better to get out before you invest so much time that it’s near impossible to walk away.
The fact of the matter is, most of the people you see in Forbes’ list of richest people in the world had to take enormous risks to get there. That almost always means a lot of failing. I know it’s easy to put a tag on the rich and say: They had it easy. It’s their parents. They were lucky. It’s probably secret societies or reincarnation. Or maybe alien control. You can find a dozen reasons to internalise somebody else’s success as ‘luck’ or ‘special access to information’. The reality is 73 out of the first 100 billionaires in the world are self made. That’s a Bloomberg fact. There’s no conspiracy going on. They just work harder than you did. Those self-made billionaires simply applied some core, fundamental knowledge everyone has access to. They did what everybody else only read about. But knowing and doing are very different things. Failure and success are very similar in that they are both spiral staircases. Once you get on, inertia keeps you going, and adds some dizziness to the process. Stop failure’s spiral by seeing it as a feedback or you’re going to go deeper and eventually crash and burn.
The only real battle in life is between hanging on and letting go. Change is a constant. Organisations are modern day marathons. It is all about the pressure to do more with less. And sometimes it is important to just let go of your initial idea and make change or start afresh. Change does not happen in parcels with one ending and a new one starting. It is pervasive from small continuous improvement to enterprise wide transformation.
PIECE OF ADVICE FOR MAKING A FRESH START:
1. TRY NEW THINGS
If you keep doing things the same way you always have, you will easily fall into a rut. To feed your creativity, you have to step out and try new things. Satisfy your thirst for something different and reap the rewards.
2. DON’T BE AFRAID TO FAIL
Failure is a roadmap for what not to do next time.
3. BE WILLING TO CHANGE
To stay relevant as you move forward in life, you have to be willing to embrace change.
4. DON’T TRY TO FIT IN
Too often, we try to fit in with our environment because we think it will help us move forward, but the person who embraces their differences stands out.
5. DON’T GET HUNG UP ON PERFECT
Parents and teachers encourage us to take time to do our best, but some time it is not practical. Instead, identify the things that are worth “gold plating,” and then adopt a policy where good is good enough.
6. BE SELFISH
To be a healthy, grounded person, you need to be selfish and take care of your own needs.
All leaders are change leaders. It is the leaders in the business who are responsible for delivering and sustaining the change. They ultimately own the benefits of all leaders, not just a few senior executives. They need to be prepared and relied upon to lead the organisational change. Leaders shape the change. Current change management has leaders being communicated with and loosely consulted. Resilient change management has ownership and determination of change of plans within the business, not a program team. So it is important to equip leaders with change data and build the leaders’ change capacity.
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