The Fine Line Between Endurance and Exhaustion

Okay, endurance is great, but sometimes if you're failing, you should just give up and say, you know what, let's sort of count our losses and do something different. Like, when does endurance get in the way?

Yeah, I think that's a very insightful question. And I think there's something to be said there about, to Tina's point, about not only superpowers, but fatal flaws. There's also generally this concept, right, of your biggest strength also is potentially your biggest weakness. And I think fundamentally I struggle with that a lot, which is it's really easy to keep going and put your head down. And it's. For me, it's very hard to cut my losses early because I'm like, ah, if I just try harder, I can probably make it work. And like, nine times out of 10 I can. And the 10th time, I waste a lot more time doing it. I think it's something I have become more and more aware of over time and something I try to be thoughtful about. The biggest way I've found to do that is through basically talking to kind of friends and mentors and call it like, outside people, because it lets me divorce the pain from the Is this likely to succeed or not? Cause they're not experiencing the pain generally of me kind of pushing on for whatever it is. And they can either say like, no, yeah, it looks like you're almost there, or no, you're really, this is hopeless. Get out. And I know I'm not bailing. Cause like, oh, man, this is really hard. Cause they don't care. It's hard. But it's hard and it's something. I've made that mistake many times in pursuing things longer than I should have.

Interesting. What do you think? So I'm curious, Steve, when you say that, I think with every good idea, I usually find that there are about 50% of people who are constantly. Who will always say, this won't work. And if you're lucky, you get 50% of people who will say, this will work. But there always are people, regardless of how good the idea is, when it's early enough, who will tell you no, throw in the towel. So when you're relying on other people rather than yourself for that guidance, how do you distinguish between those?

So I think it's really important you don't rely on them. You just look for it as another signal and say, hey, how am I feeling about this? And how are these people reacting? And it can't be one. And by the way, I don't know this is the right answer. Because I'm still not good at this, but it's made me a little bit better at it. I think you look at five or ten people and you have track records and you say, hey, are these people good at evaluating this? It's a little bit. It's really important to frame the question correctly, right? So it's not like, is this idea a good idea or not? Like, in the case of a startup, in my experience, like, 9 out of 10 people are going to tell you it's a terrible idea. And the general thinking there is that if it was already good, it would have happened and somebody else would have done it. And so it's pretty logical that most people are going to think it's a bad idea. So that's a slightly different one. But in the sense of, like, I'm in this situation, is my current kind of course in speed going to carry me through to where I want to go? I think you can frame it in a way that more people will give you better answers, but it's still more of a judgment call. And maybe once that balance shifts to like, 90% of your friends are saying, like, what are you doing? You know, it's maybe more time to pull the rip cord than when, you know, just a couple people are naysaying.