Should I Give Up? 5 Wrong Reasons for Giving Up on Your Goals

Anyone who ever worked hard and tried to achieve a serious goal knows that the journey towards achievement is not always smooth. There are ups and downs and people who want to be successful ask themselves at some point if it is time to give up. One of the things that I hear a lot that self-help gurus say and motivational speakers say is that one should not give up. People say, "Do not give up on your dreams", don't give up, don't give up.

This advice is useful. But what does it really mean to not give up and how do we know when it is time to keep trying or give up. When you face difficult times in your life, emotions take hold of you, you might see no clear way to move forward. To have someone say to you don't give up at the time when you feel emotional pain and feel stuck might be comforting but it could also be as good as telling someone to not get angry when they are already fuming with anger. It helps for you to understand when to give up and when not to give up. Sometimes healing requires that we understand causes of the disease and not just the symptoms of it. By understanding when to give up and when not to give up you will handle the situation when things are not going well and position yourself better to move forward. Know when to give up and when not to give up. This article shares 5 wrong reasons for giving up.

1. Giving up because you are not seeing results

In all our endeavors we expect to see results. That is just human nature. We sometimes do favors for people expecting that they will do the same for us. When we spend money and buy something we expect it to work as it should. In many areas of our lives we expect immediate results. This sometimes causes us to want immediate results when we attempt to be successful. Success works differently. It might not be as straight forward as we wish it could be sometimes. Just like a farmer who works hard to plant seeds and nurture his seeds until harvest, sometimes we might not see immediate results when attempting to achieve a specific goal. We therefore need to be comfortable working without seeing immediate results knowing we will reap rewards much later when harvest time arrives. Giving up on your dreams because you do not see immediate results can sometimes set you back in terms of goal achievement.

2. Giving up because you failed too many times

As human beings we are naturally wired to learn from experience. Research shows that negative experiences tend to stick to us much more than positive experiences. Our emotions also get associated with the experiences we receive from the environment. From a young age we experiment and put our fingers to burning candles testing if fire burns us. Once we get burnt we never want to put our fingers on fire again because experience has taught us that fire burns. After this we begin to associate fire with pain. When we see fire we avoid it as much as we can. This way of learning from experience and using avoidance helps us survive better.

The same thing happens once we are grown ups and attempt to achieve our goals. Much as we want to avoid failure the truth is sometimes we fail and begin to fear taking chances. This makes it difficult for us to live to our true potential and achieve our goals. Past failures have potential to affect us psychologically and cause us to fail to act in order to avoid the pain associated with failure.

This can be one of the worst reasons for giving up on your goal because past failures do not often reflect future performance. Many people who are now successful have failed many times in the past including Sylvester Stallone.

3. Giving up because you don't believe in yourself

Self-belief affects performance on how you achieve your goals. Even in sport, an athlete that is self-confident always tends to perform better than the one that lacks self-confidence. The same thing happens with our attempts to achieve our goals. When we believe in our abilities we have more faith and courage to take the actions that we need to take to achieve our goals. When we lack self-belief we get despondent and give up at the first obstacle that we encounter. We give up not because we are not capable or we are failing but because we simply do not believe in ourselves and we do not believe we can achieve our goals. This is a wrong reason to give up on your goals because it is based on self-perception rather than reality. Reality remains that all of us are capable of achieving what we set our minds to if we put enough effort and time.

4. Giving up because you are lazy to do the hard work

Sometimes giving up isn't so much about whether we will succeed or not but we give up because we dread the hard work that we need to do before we can achieve our goals. Exercising provides a very good example of how we sometimes give up on doing what we know can really work. When you eat well and exercise you are guaranteed to see positive results however it takes hard work to exercise and to get disciplined with diet. So even though you might be sure of the results you will achieve when you eat well and exercise you might give up on this consciously or subconsciously just because doing this is hard work.

5. Giving up because other people tell you to give up

Sometimes people might not support you. Perhaps your spouse doesn't support you or others say you will fail. It is possible that your vision is only visible to you and nobody else. When you are telling other people about your dream they might give many reasons why it will not succeed.

Giving up on your goal or dream because other people tell you to can be the worst thing that you ever do because your vision might not seem practical to many people. Only you know how you feel and how strong your passion is. Few people believed human beings could fly until the Wright brothers invented an airplane. Most people would be cynical when you say you can travel across the world from Africa to US in less than 3 hours yet research is currently conducted to create the fastest air plane in the world. What other people think is impossible can be very possible to you. So do not give up on your dreams just because other people have given you hundred reasons why what you are trying to achieve will not work. There might be many other ways to achieve your goals that would not be apparent to you until you are crazy enough to try what others think is impossible.

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