Everyone, welcome back. This episode, we're talking about pivoting persistence, and quitting. In 2013, I was working with my brother, we had started a company in 2009, that have been way more successful than we ever could have dreamed or hoped. But along the way, we had developed a dream for another company, we wanted to build what we called an entertainment shopping company. Basically, the idea was an e commerce store that you went on, and you pick the things that you wanted, and then at the end right before you paid, you got to play a game and get a discount on your order, and then you would pay for your order. So not a crazy idea. We were really excited about it, we thought that it had some some potential. And we started to build it in probably late 2011. By the time we got to 2013 We'd invested who knows how many millions of dollars into this idea. And we had probably made just about every mistake in the book along the way, as we built it. But we were excited. And when we first launched it, the initial data was pretty devastating. One of the things I tell people is that people bounced off the landing page, like it was a trampoline, they just did not understand what was going on. And it became evident very quickly that this was not going to work, we had not done a lot of the things that you would recommend people do. We hadn't done testing along the way, we'd kind of pushed all the chips in and when we finally released it to the world, we realized that it was not going to work in its current form, which led to I would say one of the most transformational and important years of my life, where I wrestled with what comes next. Maybe you can relate, that you've had something in your life that didn't go the way that you had hoped or that you had expected that you'd invested a lot of yourself into. And then you're trying to figure out what do I do now, what comes next, because what I learned through this experience with my brother was that many of my wirings that I'd always viewed as strengths can actually be a weakness in a different context. If you look at the research on entrepreneurship, and really just like life outcomes, one of the characteristics that really consistently jumps to the top of the list is grit or persistence, that that's simply the ability to keep going when things are hard. And the reality is, life just has hard stretches where we will want to quit. There's a really poignant example, like they asked one of the best marathoners in the world, like how do you keep going. And one of the things he said is you have to decide before the race, whether or not you're going to stop. Because if you don't, if you try and make that decision during the race, you are going to quit 100% of the time because you're not going to want to keep going. And so developing the ability to persist is this like fundamental building block to success. But the piece that I didn't understand was I didn't understand that persistence isn't always necessarily a helpful thing that sometimes it can actually be unhelpful, that sometimes it can actually keep you going in the wrong direction. And one of my favorite quotes that I've ever heard is by C.S. Lewis, and he makes the observation if you find yourself headed in the wrong direction, the quickest way to get where you want to go is to immediately stop, turn around and head in the right direction. And the problem with persistence, that persistence can cause us to keep going when the best thing would be to turn around. So when working with my brother to give you more of the story, as we got the initial data back and things were not going well. Our reaction was that we were convinced the the idea was sound, we just needed to change our approach a little bit we needed to slightly pivot. And so we tried for I would say the next 15 months to almost two years to make incremental tweaks to the model or to the website in order to make it more attractive to people, in order to attract more customers. And every time we made a tweak, the numbers got a little bit better, but they were still so far away from where they needed to be people just were not, the majority people were not understanding that what we were doing, yet we kept going. And what I realized through the process is the reason that we kept pushing forward is that it was too painful emotionally, to accept the idea that it may just be a failure, that maybe the best course of action would be to quit. And, and the reason is that I had a lot of time and a lot of identity kind of invested and sunk into what I was working on. So to walk away from that to stop doing, it would have been really emotionally difficult. I don't think I had the emotional maturity to actually do that. And so instead, when all the data was telling me, you're headed in the wrong direction, I was leaning on my ability to keep going through adversity, when I shouldn't have been. And if you're listening to this, you're probably the type of person that's really interested in developing yourself, and you likely are a persistent person. And so I think one of the messages is know that that can be your biggest strength, or it can be a weakness in the right context. And wisdom is learning when your persistence is going to take you the wrong direction. So one of the ways that I learned through this process of 18 to 24 months of kind of wandering in the wilderness working on this project that would never get there was the importance of getting external feedback and data to help you understand whether or not you're close enough to make a slight course correction, or pivot, or whether something needed to be abandoned altogether. But the reality is, all of us do this. There's areas in all of our lives where we are continuing to push ahead, when the evidence and the feedback is all saying like, hey, try a different approach. Or maybe you shouldn't even be trying this at all. And the point of today's episode, is having the wisdom and the discernment to make that choice. We live in a culture that celebrates starting things, it doesn't really celebrate quitting things. But the reality is to go all the way with anything to be really successful, and really persistent in the right things requires us to be able to quit the things, the wrong things quickly. Seth Godin has a great quote, winners quit, they quit often, and they quit without guilt. There's another great quote from that book called The Dip, where he talks about how the key to quitting is that you tell yourself, I will quit quickly on most things. But the things that I don't quit quickly will be the things that I promised myself, I will see till the end, being great at persistence actually requires being great at quitting. Because to continue to keep going on the things that really matter. We have to say no, and we have to stop the things that the other things that would take our time and our attention that would take us away from the things that really matter. Steve Jobs once famously said, focus is about saying no. And so when we see things in our life, that are taking us the wrong direction, or taking our attention, that are taking our capacity, we have to have the ability to say no to those things, to stop those things. Because that's what makes it possible to pursue the things that really matter. So when do you quit? You quit when there's no clear path, and there's no clear data that you're headed in the right direction. You need to have truth tellers in your life, you need to have people that you trust that are willing to tell you their honest assessment of things. One of the ways that you can determine when it's time to quit, is if people are not willing to trade money for whatever it is you're trying to create. And the reason for that is because it's the most impartial way that people can give you feedback about a product or a thing that you're building. For example, if you ask your friends or your family, what they think about your business idea or your nonprofit or whatever else, they may be incentivized to tell you what they think you want to hear. But the moment that you ask people to put money behind supporting whatever it is that you're working on, you get a clearer insight of what they really think. And so when people perceive that you're creating something that has value, they naturally are going to want to buy more of your product or to or to donate to it or to support it in some way. And if you're not seeing evidence of that, that's probably a red flag. That's a sign that it might be time to quit, the way to to turbocharge your persistence, is, ironically, to get better at quitting. If you want to be better at persisting, you have to first get better at quitting. And becoming good at quitting means being honest with yourself, having the ability to look at feedback, external data, and really dispassionately saying, hey, is this the right way for me to be investing my time? Am I headed the right direction, as we get better at assessing that, then all of a sudden, we feel more freed up to actually stop doing the things that we don't need to be doing. So some things that have caused me to quit things in my life over like the last five years. One is, if it doesn't align with my core values, then I stop, it's easy to think, well, I can change it, you know, I can make this organization better. But at this point in my life, I've realized that instead of doing that, I would rather focus my time in things that do line up with my values. Relationships are another area, there are so many people in the world, I can't have close relationships with everybody, we are all making choices about the relationships that we're going to invest our time in, and, and quite frankly, which are the relationships we're going to quit investing time in. And I think that it's easy to fall into a pattern of like continuing to invest time in relationships, just because we did previous stages of our life. But we should be constantly evaluating is this Are these the right people for me to be investing my time in? Do I like the person I'm becoming and growing into, obviously, in business, probably the best example I can give is that after years of working on this project with my brother, we finally put this thing in the ground proverbially in 2015. And one of the reasons why that was such a big moment for me, is that that was the moment where I started to become open to creating my next company, and to go in a different direction. And that's what turned into Simple Modern, but I wasn't really emotionally, financially ready to try something new until I had made the decision to let go of this dream that I had, that I had invested a lot of myself into. And I think that that's really the point of the episode is that part of being good at quitting, part of being good at persisting, is really about managing ourselves and our emotions and realizing that, so often we find ourselves working on projects or doing things simply because that's what we did yesterday. And not because it's the best choice for today. And that every day, we get this opportunity to reset, and to look at all the things going on in our life. And to choose whether or not those are the things that we want to be investing our time into. Those are the best opportunities for us today. And what we should keep going on and what we should what we should bring. So sometimes, we need to just keep going. It's hard, but we're on the right path, we've just got to push through it. Sometimes, we need to stop altogether. Like we realize from the feedback like hey, this is not the right path at all. But often we're headed in a general right direction, but not exactly the vector we want to be going on. And this is when pivoting comes in. And so if you think about it, it's just a slight change in direction. And when I talk about Simple Modern as a business, one of the things that I try and communicate is that we are constantly pivoting. I think when we hear the word pivoting, we tend to think about like big, massive pivots. But most pivots are actually much more slight direction changes. And if you think about it, our lives are filled with small pivots. I'm a parent, I have a 10 year old and a seven year old. And every day, I feel like I change my approach just a little bit towards parenting them. Some of that is that they're getting older and that they're growing as people. But also some of that is that every day I'm trying little experiments of better ways to communicate with them or lead them. And I'm changing my approach a little bit. The same can be true of organizations that we start, or really almost any aspect of our life. And so what I would encourage you is that often the answer is not as binary is do I stop or do I keep going, but that it's the in between? Do I keep going with a slightly different approach? So in applying these principles to your life, here are some questions that I would ask what's an area of your life where the future is uncertain? It's not clear what you should do. Should you keep going, should you stop? Should you kind of change course a little bit and pivot? What's one area? What's an area of your life that if you're being realistic with yourself, you should just quit altogether? Where you're investing time, energy capacity resources because of decisions you made in the past. But if you look at it today, it doesn't really make any sense? What's an area of your life where things are hard, but the feedback you're getting is that you're actually headed in the right direction. It's just challenging because of circumstances. And because life is sometimes hard? What's one area of your life where a slight change in approach could be really helpful? I have this principle, whenever I pull out something that needs to be assembled, I hate looking at the instructions. And often, I will try and deduce how to put it together. And that inevitably leads to a step where I'm trying to either fit something in a way that won't quite fit or I'm trying to push a button in a way that doesn't seem to want to be pushed. And my first reaction is always to just kind of push harder, which has caused me to break countless things. The reality is usually in life, the answer is not to push harder. But when something's not quite working the way that we want it to take a step back and ask how do I change my approach slightly?