Giving Up

If you’re taking the wrong medication, taking more of it isn’t going to help.

It doesn’t matter how fast you’re going if you’re headed in the wrong direction.

There’s a kind of false comfort in sticking with the wrong thing. At least it’s familiar. Carrying on spares us the awkwardness of uncertainty. But the longer we refuse to change course, the further we drift from where we actually need to be.

Here’s where most of us get tangled: when deciding whether to walk away, we drag the past into the equation. We think about everything we’ve already poured in like time, money and effort, as if that should count for something. But the truth is, it shouldn’t. Those investments are gone. Lost. Irrelevant.

Every decision is a fresh one. Whatever your past self gave you. Maybe it’s a law degree or a travel agency, or maybe the ability to do calligraphy in Cyrillic, which really is a gift. Whatever it is, your future self owes nothing to the past self.

The trap is that we hold onto old competencies and hard-earned status roles long after they’ve expired. We mistake sunk costs for anchors, when in fact they’re chains. The only way to create something genuinely new is to let something else go.

That’s what makes real leadership hard. New decisions, based on new information, can’t be made if you’re still doing the mental bookkeeping of old choices. Even creativity, requires risk and space for something new, and new can only arise when we make space for it which usually involves leaving something behind.

Albert Camus called our refusal to do this a form of the absurd. We double down on routines that don’t answer the deeper questions of our lives. We fill calendars, grind harder, reassure ourselves that effort equals progress and productivity equals meaning. But if the direction itself is wrong, all the effort and productivity in the world only digs the hole deeper.

Camus wasn’t saying effort is useless, only that blind effort is. His challenge was to step into uncertainty, to risk changing course, to give up the comfort of “more of the same.” The danger isn’t failure, it’s succeeding at the wrong thing.

For years culture has romanticised the myth of relentless pursuit: that it’s always worth paying the price to reach your goal, that quitting is weakness. Of course, sometimes pushing through the dip is exactly what it takes to succeed. But if the cost is becoming someone you’re not, or mutating into something hollow, then the braver move is to quit.

So the real question isn’t, “Am I trying hard enough?” It’s, “Is this even the right thing to be trying at all?”