The fox saw a bunch of inviting grapes hanging high up on a vine. It was too high to reach. After a few attempts, he gave up and consoled himself that the grapes must surely be sour. We’ve all been told this tale and along with it, the moral that we shouldn’t give up on something just because it is hard to achieve.
While that is a good lesson to learn, is everything nice worth the effort it takes to obtain?
Sometimes there are very good reasons to give up on something. The most common argument against comes from the hesitation to let go of resources we have already invested. This is the sunk-cost fallacy.
Another reason ideas are pursued for longer than they should be is a strongly held conviction about the destination. The Indian government’s pursuit of an open-defecation-free country is one such example. Multiple governments have tried to address this issue through the construction of toilets. There is no argument on whether this is a goal worth pursuing – it is. But doing the same thing over and over again in the expectation of a different outcome is plain hubris.
When Edison was asked about his 10000 failures, he replied that he hadn’t failed 10000 times but had learned 10000 ways that didn’t work. The key here is that he tried 100000 different things. He wasn’t doing the same thing repeatedly. In such cases, one walks away from the approach and not the goal.
Knowing when to let go is as important as, if not more important than, knowing when to hang in there. It is important to ask oneself what price one is ready to pay to reach the destination.
It is easy to be blinded by a single-minded focus on a target. That sort of focus can lead you to miss other opportunities that may be opening up around you. Even worse, it can blind you to the harm you may be doing in the process.
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