Persistence and failure are two sides of the same coin. And quitting is a necessary part to get to success. When we're resistant to failure or resistant to quitting because of emotional issues that we have. And when we work through those, and make the best decision possible, that's where we ultimately get where we want to be.
From We Are For Good Studios and Simple Modern. Welcome to Scaling for Good with Mike Beckham, a limited podcast series, giving you the playbook to start, build, scale and give generously. Today's episode we're diving into when to persist, and when to quit. When faced with the question, what do we do now? You have three options. Mike breaks those down and shared a personal story of when it was time to quit. And what led him to what is now Simple Modern. Let's dive in.
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?
Hey, friends, taking a quick break to share a glimpse of generosity on the front lines, some of Simple Modern's, amazing nonprofit partners, Simple Modern is on a mission to give generously. They partner with nonprofit organizations all over the world to help make a positive impact in five core areas, water supply, human trafficking, education, marginalized communities and homelessness. Today, we'd like to introduce you to one of their nonprofit partners and one of my personal favorites, Positive Tomorrows.
Hi there. I'm Margaret Creighton, I am the president and CEO of Positive Tomorrows, and we are Oklahoma's only elementary school and social service agency, specifically serving kiddos and families experiencing homelessness. So we are a fully accredited private school working on education, while we wrap their families and all the supports that they need to gain stability. So that's housing and income jobs. And then we provide that special time outside of school to provide great camps and an after school program for kiddos when they're outside of school time. We're so grateful for Simple Modern, they're helping us to open up brand new classrooms next year. And we can't wait to serve more kiddos and families in the future. If you want to learn more about Positive Tomorrows you can visit positivetomorrows.org.
Hey, it's Jon and Becky back for this half. And if you could just feel during the last segment, we were just on the sidelines. Just we're so ready to get into this conversation, Mike, because people don't talk enough about quitting. And I just love the way that you walked us into that because it's almost like persistence, that side of it is this virtue that everybody you know, really admires? But this idea of quitting just has a stigma around it. Will you kind of take us through the journey of how can we redirect? How do we change our mindsets around that?
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I think where that comes from is that quitting has very negative stigma. It's viewed as like a bad thing, a failure thing. Persistence is viewed as really positive. That's a triumph. That's good. The stories that we tell even you know, we talk about startups, a lot of times we tell these stories, these heroic stories of in the face of all this adversity, he ran up his credit cards. And you know, and then you know, this amazing breakthrough. In fact, we don't tell the stories where people kept going, and they run up their credit cards, and then they just went into bankruptcy. And there's probably a lot more of those stories, right. And so some of what I think distorts this for people is that we have this survivorship bias. If you're not familiar with the idea of survivorship bias. It's basically this idea that you hear the stories of the people that live to tell, and you don't hear or hear the stories of everybody who didn't survive. And so sometimes you survive because you had the best strategy. And sometimes you just survived because you were lucky. The reality is that quitting and persisting are two sides of the same coin. And at any given moment, one is more wise than the other. And that really the muscle here is figuring out which is more wise in this situation. And probably in your life right now there are parts of your life, where it is hard and pushing through is what you need. It's the digging deep and pushing through, I certainly wouldn't discount the need for grit. And if anybody heard this and thought, oh, when things get hard then it's time to quit, and they will be missing kind of the point. But at the same time, there are probably other things in your life right now, in each of our lives, where it is time, to part ways that we have been pursuing something we've been investing our time and our passion towards something and it's just clear that it's no longer the right way to be investing time. A lot of times it's because there's some kind of deep emotional investment we have in that thing, right. It's our organization has been doing it for 20 years and we can't we can't kill the dinner. You know, it's the dinner right? Or the startup's my dream and if I make the decision to not pursue this anymore, then what does that say about me? And so I really think a lot of this flows out of having a proper view that quitting can be a superpower just like persistence. And that managing our own emotions and being honest with ourselves, the reasons why we're doing what we're doing, it turns out, it's a lot easier for us to understand why other people do what they do, then sometimes it is for us to understand why we do the very things that we do. And a lot of the time that the things that we invest time on the things that we keep pursuing for months or years, it's not because we think it's the best choice, but because of something inside of us or an insecurity inside of us and what we would lose if we said goodbye to it.
I just have to say that when we were storyboarding this conversation in this podcast series, this was the topic I was the most surprise to see on the list. And I have to tell you, it's become my favorite. Because I feel like you're giving everyone out there permission to exhale. And you're saying that, hey, successful people quit at things. Yeah. And but I also think the resiliency component is so fascinating and how you fail forward. Because you know, we have a phrase in our house, you don't ever lose, you learn. And what can you take from these experiences and move forward? Because I do think you're bringing up the, the dinner that we've always done. And I'm telling you, if you're a nonprofit professional out there, I know you have sacred cows in your organization, you have events, because the board chairs wife started in, and that's her favorite fashion luncheon that she did, but there's not even maybe a financial reason that we're doing it or possibly it doesn't align with the mission. And I feel like you're giving us permission to say, It's okay. So when does someone know, okay, it's time to quit. Or maybe we just need to pivot away from this thing that has been this is the dirty word, a nonprofit, it's the way that we've always been doing.
Well, I think that if you're getting real feedback from the people you're trying to serve in this place, it's it's the the beneficiaries of the nonprofit, or it's your your customers, if you're running a for profit company. And those, the engagement, you know, the sales like are heading in the wrong direction, or that you're just not able to get people to show interest in all for the first time. Like you have to be open eyes and face reality, right? It's one thing to feel like, it's close. But there's a missing kind of connection here. Like we're not quite hitting exactly what the market wants. And usually, when you talk to customers, they will communicate that to you, when you talk to beneficiaries, like oh, man, this service would be great for my family. But if it's at three o'clock in the afternoon, I can't take advantage of it because I have to work, right? Like, that's an example where it's like, Hey, you don't have fit. And maybe it's not like, Hey, kill the program. It's just like the way that we conceived the program probably wasn't the best fit. Or when customers are saying, Man, this is a great product, if it was $10 cheaper, I would really strongly consider it. And then there's other situations where it's like, you're just not getting any engagement at all. And you're kind of met more with indifference. I think some of it is that you have to be really willing to get feedback from the market, I think part of it is having a team of people that feel comfortable and empowered to really share what they're observing when you have a culture that you know, nobody says anything bad about the fashion show you just don't right? Then that's a culture where you can keep going the wrong direction for too long. Because everybody's scared to be the first person to say, hey, you know, the emperor has new clothes, this is not a good idea. So there's, there's a great quote, wisdom comes from experience and experience comes from failure. Here's the thing about failure that I would want everybody who listens to this to understand, failure is not an unfortunate but necessary byproduct of success. Failure is the fuel that leads to success. It is impossible to get to success without failure. If you look at the most successful people across the last several 1000 years, and you look at what made them great, there is one common factor and that is that they were all exceptionally productive. That not just that they make great stuff. But they made so much stuff like this is the Mozarts and the Bachs of the world, right? That there was just voluminous output. And so one of the most interesting things is, if you think about Mozart or Bach or any of these kinds of composers or you know, you pick your field, you would you would naturally think that as they got further into their career, that their success rate would go up. But it turns out, it doesn't. It turns out that at his height, Mozart or Beethoven was producing just as many works of art that we don't remember today at all, as he was fifth symphonies. The key was he was just churning out more stuff than any other point in his life. That's what defined the peak is the volume of output. And so here's the point, you don't hit homeruns without taking swings, and you don't take swings without striking out. That's the point. That's the whole way you get there. And so what we need to do is encourage with people normalize the fact that failure is what helps propel you to success. And to be more afraid of never hitting a homerun, then you are striking out.
I mean, I just hear this thread of you got curious when things didn't maybe pan out the way that you thought and that took you into a better space. And it just feels like the right posture for that as creating a culture that it's safe to fail. And I mean, talk about how you really create that what are the questions that are safe to ask, how do you build that?
One of the most helpful things that we talk about, is that mistakes or failures are tuition. Within an organization, how do you define what something that didn't go the way you want it to go is, and in some organizations, it's like, well, we don't ever talk about that. In the best organizations, I think instead, those are actually held up, you know, it's like, hey, we tried this thing, and it didn't go the way that we thought it was gonna go. But it was this incredible learning opportunity. And it made all this other stuff possible in the future. The reality is like, anything you try, that doesn't go well is costly, it costs time it costs money, and you're paying something for it. So at the very least, you should get some knowledge out of it, you know, is the way that we view it. That's what quitting and failure can produce is it can produce learning. And when we view it that way, this is why it's a necessary part of success. It's the toll that you have to pay to get to success, because there's no other way you get the learning that produces the success. But you have to have the mindset of not only is there freedom to fail, not only do you not lose your job if things fail, but that the best thing you can possibly do is when things don't go the way that we think they will that number one that's interesting, because it means we have a worldview, that is wrong in some way, and can get better. And that number two, you can take that and you can be even more effective. Even though that particular project didn't go the way that you wanted it to, our team can be better and can be more effective as a result of it. And we can get that positive outcome out of it, you do that. And then you create a situation where people are willing to try things that they don't know will succeed. Ironically, good quitting, the type of quitting where you're quitting, because it's the right decision to make requires not being afraid of failure, the more afraid of failure you are, the more at risk, you are actually doing the bad type of quitting the type of quitting that's about self preservation, or about the perception of other people. That's what we're trying to kind of create in our culture and is good for any culture, whether you're trying to build a family or run a business or a nonprofit. So one of the biggest questions is, what do you recognize? And how do you talk about yourself? One is, it's very difficult to create a culture where quitting and failure is viewed as anything other than a negative thing. If the leader is unwilling to show weakness, if the leader is not sharing examples of failure and quitting in their life, and how that produced growth and how that helped them, then it is very difficult for anyone else in the organization to really believe that thought process. And I'll build on that with another idea, which is what do you clap for in an organization matters a lot. And what we tend to get clapped for if you think about the course of your life, most of the affirmation and positive reinforcement that you get is from people taking things that you are obviously good at, and saying, Hey, you're really great at this thing. And it's not that that's unhelpful. But it's just that we've already kind of heard that. And it's not a result of deliberate effort. Usually, it's a result of gifting. And so I think when we affirm people's obvious natural gifting, it's not nearly as powerful as the alternative. So if you think about the times that people have spoken in your life, and it's been the most transformational, my guess, is that it's when somebody has talked about an aspect of you that you have had to fight and claw to grow in where there wasn't the natural gifting where it wasn't easy. And someone else saw that and affirmed that. And it meant a ton to you. And so when you create an organization where what gets clapped for is persistence, through difficulty, you know, quitting it when it's appropriate and changing directions, when these are kind of things that you lift up. It makes people so much more willing to actually do them. And that's what we should be trying to create in just the cultures around us. Where we clap loudest when we see people doing what's hard. And often quitting is the hardest thing to do. You know, quitting takes the most internal resolve. When we see growth mindset, when we see people challenging themselves in areas that aren't easy and are hard and they do want to quit but the right move is to push through. That's really the job of the leader. So the leaders job, ironically, is to create this culture where there is freedom to fail. And where there is a healthy amount of persistence, and that you're encouraging people to appropriately persist when the road is hard, but they're on the right path. And that it's okay to quit and to learn from it when it's going the wrong direction, but they want to keep going because they don't want to fail.
I have to just say the thing that I'm taking away from this so much is and it's a question for everyone out there. How are you socializing the failure? Because what you just said right there, and I'd love it like as our resident storyteller here is, how are you telling the story of failure within your organization? And I think we have some limiting beliefs, specifically in nonprofit about, oh, we can't go to the board and tell them that this didn't work. Of course, you can go to the board, you can go to the board and say, we tried this, it didn't go exactly how we thought however, we learned this about the process. We're refining it, you know, it makes me think of that quote from Thomas Edison, where people were talking about you he failed 2000 times before he figured out how to build the light bulb. And he's like, No, I figured out 1099 ways not to build a light bulb. And so how we're talking about failure, how we're encouraging and using it as a springboard to the next thing that we're going to learn to iterate is to me half of the battle, I think you all do this beautifully. And I really commend the way that you have kind of helped me think about that everything ends, right, we need to accept that everything ends and when we can embrace that, it's just easier to move forward. So that's a challenge to everyone out there. Whether you're a leader or whether you're one of the worker bees, like I feel like I've been many times in my life. So round this out for us, Mike, bring us your Mike drop moment. What is the thing that you want to leave people with in terms of persistence, and failure in quitting and pivoting? What would be the one thing?
Absolutely, persistence and failure are two sides of the same coin, and failure, quitting is a necessary part to get to success when we're resistant to failure or resistant to quitting because of emotional issues that we have. And when we work through those and make the best decision possible, that's where we ultimately get where we want to be.
Thanks for tuning in to Scaling for Good, brought to you by Simple Modern and We Are For Good studios. If you like what you've heard, leave a review, share with your colleagues or tweet Mike @MikeBeckhamSM, we're your host Becky Endicott and Jon McCoy. And this series was edited and produced by Julie Confer and a special thanks to Chris Boyle and Erica Randall from the Simple Modern team who helped bring the series to life.
