How do we know when to quit? Persistence may be futile choice

By David McElroy · November 25, 2018

Inspirational quotes often give very bad advice.

In fact, if you want advice, I can find multiple pieces of folk wisdom or quotes from famous people to share with you — almost none of which would agree with the rest. I can give you folk wisdom about never giving up or I can give you folk wisdom about cutting your losses before they get worse. Which one is good advice?

Why is so much of our collective folk wisdom contradictory? And why does following some of this wisdom not seem to help us?

I’m thinking about this tonight because I ran across a quote which was attributed to Winston Churchill: “Never give up on something that you can’t go a day without thinking about.”

Is that good advice? I have no idea. I guess if you don’t give up on the thing and your persistence brings it to pass, it was great advice. But what if you spend years persisting — passing up other opportunities — in order to stick with something? If you end up with nothing, it was terrible advice and it leaves your miserable.

I wrestle with this issue all the time. I used to be too prone to giving up quickly. Then I read a lot about persistence and examples of people getting the things they wanted because they persisted, so I became painfully persistent when I truly wanted something.

Another reason I think about it so frequently today is that something which I wrote on the subject six years ago mocks me today. I wrote an article making the case for not giving up on what you truly want. It features an excerpt from Napoleon Hill’s book, “Think and Grow Rich,” which tells the story of a couple of prospectors looking for gold who quit digging — and gave up — when they were only three feet away from the vein of gold which someone else would find after they gave up and left.

It’s a great story. The graphic I chose for the piece illustrates the lesson quite well. Lots of people preach this lesson. In fact, New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton somehow found my article and had a copy placed in the lockers of each of his players when they were going through some adversity a few years back. (It was reported at the time by the New Orleans Times-Picayune and a New Orleans radio station, although I can’t find the link right now.)

But when I see people randomly finding that article every day — it’s been read by 47 people so far today, for instance — I sometimes want to find them and say, “Hey, maybe that was bad advice. Maybe you really ought to give up.”

Let me go back to the alleged Churchill quote. He says I shouldn’t give up on something I can’t go a day without thinking about? What if I can’t go an hour without thinking of this thing I want? Does that make it an even better idea? Or does it just mean I’m doomed to torture myself obsessing over something I can’t have — something I can’t force myself to give up on?

I wish I could just say that enough faith and desire will bring us what we need. There are a lot of smart people who teach that faith and intense desire will eventually bring us what our heart wants. But what if they’re wrong?

Pat Terry had a piece of wisdom in a song he wrote back in 1984. In “Truth is Like a Sword,” he wrote, “Demand too much and you may end up empty-handed, demand too little and regret is your reward.”

That line haunts me. When it comes to love, maybe I’ve demanded too much by loving in the way my heart wants to love. I’ve ended up empty-handed so far. I’ve tried to do the opposite, too. I told you recently about a woman I dated a couple of years ago which was really an example of expecting too little — and regret is all I felt about every moment I spent with her.

So how do we know when to persist? And how do we know when to give up?

I often look at the bits and pieces of wisdom that are embodied in quotes — even the ones that I use at times — and I wonder if they’re wisdom or if they’re just our way of saying, “See? Someone else agrees with me!”

If I want to persist — if my heart is desperate to hold onto hope that I can have what I need — isn’t it natural to gravitate to wisdom which agrees with doing what I want to do? I’m not sure that wisdom from the past is anything more than a catalog of words we choose from to justify what we want to do.

I can’t decide whether I regret writing that article six years ago urging people not to give up. At its core, I think it’s good advice — for most people and in most situations. I think we’re far too prone to give up easily. I think we’re far too willing to walk away at the first bit of adversity.

But what if we’re asking for too much — something which we can’t have which we need — and we destroy ourselves by ending up with nothing? Is it worth destroying ourselves in order to prove a point about persistence?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. I obsess about them frequently lately. I wish I could answer them. But sometimes it doesn’t really matter what we consciously decide. So maybe it’s a moot point.

Maybe there are times when a heart locks in on something it needs — and refuses to accept a substitute or a second choice. Maybe there are times when it’s not a matter of choice anymore.

Maybe the heart is determined to persist — despite what the brain’s reason has to say — even if that means ending up empty-handed and empty-hearted. I’m not sure I have a conscious choice, because my heart won’t let me do anything else.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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