How Do You Know When to Pivot and When to Persevere?

Setting specific goals for different parts of my life has proven to be an extremely helpful practice over the last 10 years of my life.  That may seem obvious but the big difference between how I set goals before that time and after, was the fact that I started writing things down and regularly revisiting what I had written to see if it still made sense.

I am not a believer in the idea that one should ‘never quit’ or ‘never give up’.  There is both a time for persistence and a time for pivoting.  The key is having enough self knowledge to know when to implement which strategy.  As I talked about in yesterday’s post ( https://travisdaigle.com/2023/04/13/everyone-should-write-regularly/ ) writing is a great way to develop self knowledge and writing about my goals and the process of moving towards those goals has helped me tremendously in understanding when it’s time to persevere and when it’s time to quit.

Just to help you get organized, I think of practical everyday life in 4 specific categories:  health, personal finances, relationships, and work.  If we think of ourselves like a business made up of one person, how we handle our hygiene, diet, and exercise habits would be like our healthcare benefits.  How we handle our personal finances represents our accounting dept. and retirement benefits.  Relationships, that’s the human resources department.  Work is like the corporate leadership that establishes vision, mission and values and plans to meet objectives.  I have to assume that a good company is very specific and intentional about how they set goals and measure progress in each one of these areas.  I would also imagine that many companies abandon goals/strategies that don’t prove to be fruitful or value-aligned as the process plays out.

I have specific goals in all four areas that I evaluate on a pretty regular basis.  I’ve learned to set goals at the beginning of the year and once a month I revisit my journal and evaluate progress and update those goals.  I’ll keep certain objectives and drop others.  Sometimes I quit goals because they don’t line up with my morals and I couldn’t see that until I started working on them.  Sometimes I’ll drop things because there simply isn’t enough time to pursue them well and I overshot on my initial objectives.  Sometimes I’ll drop things because my heart just isn’t in it.

The process of writing specific goals down, regularly writing to evaluate the actions I’m taking, and updating based on evaluation has been huge for me especially in the last couple years.  Follow through is incredibly important but when I was an engineer I learned that much of my follow through had to do with people pleasing.  I stuck with it for the time I did because I wanted other people to be happy with me.  I was afraid to quit because I was too concerned about other people’s opinion of me and not focused on figuring myself out.  

You don’t want to limit the  tools you have in life.  Perseverance is a tool for certain situations.  Quitting is another tool for certain situations.  It’s our job as individuals to figure out the right tool for the job and writing has certainly been helpful for me in that regard.