It's Never too Late: How to Know When to Quit
I always tell people how important is to stick with something. Overnight success is never going to work, and every time I hear someone telling me his overnight success story, I always turn my head around. The reason is that I know that overnight success is always followed by months or years of hard work and failures.
For example I created the code for this blog in no more than 8 hours across just two days. The interface is simple and when I need something I can put it directly on the blog by myself without having to rely to other people for plugins or widgets. Yet it took me three years of experience to create a production ready blog in just two days, so even in this case it’s not an overnight success by any means.
Anyway, this post is not about unveiling the myth of overnight success, Instead what I want to talk is about quitting. You know, the worst thing after not trying something new, is to not quit when you should. The last thing you want, is to continue to spend time on the same thing that doesn’t work, only because you don’t know what else you can do, or because you don’t want to throw away months or years of previous work.
Fortunately, it’s easy to know when you should keep doing something, and when it would be better to consider something else. In most cases you just have to follow three simple steps.
Step 1: Define
The first thing to do is to define a goal. For example when I started this blog my goal was to share my experiences and hopefully help and inspire others. Everything I did on the blog was done with that end result in mind. If my goal was to make money instead, I would have done something different.
Step 2: Measure
It’s important that you know wherever you are improving or not, and in order to do that, you have to choose a way to measure your progress. Again, one way I can measure how I’m doing with this blog is through the number of people who have subscribed to it. However, if my end goal was to make money, I would have just measured how much profits I were making.
Whatever you do, keep a record of how you are doing. This is generally easy if you are working online, as there are plenty of analytics tools available for free.
Step 3: Analyze
This is the most important step.
After a few weeks or months that you begin tracking your progress, you can start to analyze your results. Generally, you can run into one of these three possibilities:
Case 1: you are doing good.
Case 2: you are neither doing good nor bad.
Case 3: you are doing bad.
As you can see, it’s easy to figure out wherever your’re doing good or not, you simply have to look at your progress chart, which is either positive or it’s not.
In case you are wondering, the problem with case 2 is that stability it’s often a predecessor of troubles.
So what do you do if you are not growing?
Now, if your progress chart looks like the one in case 2 or 3, there’s probably something wrong with your product and you have to do something about it.
Note that it might not be the product per se, but also its environment. For example you might have a poor landing page or a bad design.
Sometimes the problem is not even evident to your eyes, and that’s the reason usability testing were invented. Ask someone you know to use your product or website in front of you, and see how he or she uses it. Ask them for general feedback.
If you feel that you can’t do much to change the situation, one of the remaning options is simply to quit. Note that you don’t have to feel bad when you quit, after all you have just tried something new, and now it’s time to try something else.
A positive chart doesn’t mean you have to stop improving
Just because you are doing good now doesn’t mean that you should stop trying new things. On the contrary, trying new things stimulates your brain and you’ll be improving every time.
Remember that it takes a lot of time to create something remarkable, but if your chart is growing you’ll eventually get there. At the end, it’s only a matter of persistence, so never give up.
