Knowing When to Persevere and When to Change Direction
Successful people quit fast and often when they detect a plan is not the best fit with their abilities and interests.
“Of one thing I am sure, you are no artist. You started too late.”
So said the art-dealer boss, who had deemed his employee’s paintings to be unworthy of being displayed for sale. It was a theme the man had heard many times before. He had been a student, an art dealer, a teacher, and a prospective pastor. He’d failed at all, despite promising starts.
At thirty-two years of age, the man enrolled in an art school alongside students a decade younger, but lasted only a few weeks. Before he left, he entered the class drawing competition. The judges advised him to join the beginner’s class with ten-year-olds. In a letter to his brother, his anguish was palpable.
“A man doesn’t always know himself what he could do, but he feels by instinct, I’m good for something, even so! … I know that I could be a quite different man! … There’s something within me, so what is it!”
The man was a hard worker, but his interests changed like the seasons. He became consumed with one thing, failed, then moved to the next. Only in the last four years of his life, from ages 33 to 37, did he settle on his unique style. And there his creativity exploded, creating the masterpieces we know today, like ‘Sunflowers’ and ‘The Starry Night.’
Searching for your “match quality”
Vincent Van Gogh is a perfect example of an individual’s search for what economists call “match quality”—the degree of fit between the work you do and who you are. That you’re in the place where you should be.
Van Gogh tested options with intensity and got the maximum information signal about his fit as quickly as possible, then moved to something else. He repeated this pattern until he zigzagged his way to an artistic place no-one had ever ventured, and where he alone excelled. His style was spontaneous. Failure and new directions set him free.
Today, it’s never felt more important in our careers to be somewhere we belong. Somewhere we feel we are contributing to a higher purpose, doing great work only we can do. Finding our own match quality.
There’s a secret to achieving match quality—have many different experiences across your career. It often surprises us how capable we are of significant changes to our lives and careers. Closing one door to open another.
Yet, we’re reminded that winners never quit.
The trouble with a never quit mentality
Grit is popular. It’s what winners have. If you lack the courage to stick with something and see it through, you’ve failed. That’s a common message today. There is a well-known quote by Winston Churchill often used in motivational messages: “Never give in, never, never, never, never.” But that quote isn’t complete. Churchill continued, “except to convictions of honour and good sense.” That part of the quote is rarely added.
Passion and grit have an important place, of course. We shouldn’t give up when something is difficult. That perseverance through difficult times can be a competitive advantage and lead us to success. This is resilience, but resilience is nuanced. It’s perseverance with a purpose. If the goal or outcome no longer makes sense or has changed, it may be better to quit or shift direction. Resilience requires us to continually re-evaluate our position based on new information we receive.
It can be brave to push through, and it can be brave to quit. Quitting is a decision, not a character trait or flaw. Reframe it as letting go of an opportunity that is no longer there. Indeed, changing direction and making a switch can launch us into exciting unchartered territory, closer to our belonging and fit.
Nintendo quit the playing card business to focus on making video games and consoles. Roger Federer quit his dream of being a professional football player to focus on tennis.
The trick is to stay attuned to whether switching is simply a failure of perseverance, or astute recognition that better matches are available based on your abilities and interests.
Try harder or walk away.
One way we can help make that distinction is by dispelling some dysfunctional beliefs.
Don’t follow your passion and other dysfunctional beliefs
In his 2021 TED Talk, Bill Burnett from the Stanford Life Design Lab dispelled what he called dysfunctional beliefs—myths that prevented people from designing the life they want.
Dysfunctional belief #1: Follow your passion. Most people don’t know what their passion is and there isn’t a lot of good evidence that matching the content of your work to a pre-existing interest is a major driver of satisfaction in that job. Many people who love their careers didn’t follow their passion. They followed the goal of being passionate about their work, experimenting, trying different things, building mastery, autonomy, and impact.
Dysfunctional belief #2 It’s too late. There’s no such thing as being late to a good life. Start wherever you are. Don’t ask, who do I really want to become? Ask smaller questions that can actually be tested like what should I start to explore now? And how can I do that? Every experience you’ve had up to now has been valuable, even negative ones.
Dysfunctional belief #3: Be the best possible version of you. This implies best is a single thing, and that life is linear. There are many versions of you that can play out. We are each made up of many possibilities and we grow and evolve and blossom and discover new things all the time. Our identities can change.
The work of Brent W. Roberts, a psychologist and specialist in personality development, backs Burnett’s dysfunctional beliefs up.
Roberts’ research illustrates we are all works in progress and that our personality traits change over time. The most significant personality traits take place between 18 years of age and our late 20s. So, if an individual tries to specialise in something during these years, or have notions of following a passion or dream because that’s what everyone tells them to do, it’s much harder because they are trying to predict match quality for a person who doesn’t yet exist.
We learn who we are by living, and not before
David Epstein’s 2019 book, Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World, makes a compelling case for breadth over specialisation, that people who think broadly and embrace diverse experiences in life will increasingly thrive.
Epstein highlights the work of Herminia Ibarra, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School. Ibarra’s research underscores that we learn who we are only by living, and not before.
“We maximise match quality throughout life by sampling activities, social groups, contexts, jobs, careers, and then reflecting and adjusting our personal narratives. And repeat.”
This goes against common advice like follow your passion and don’t give up on your dreams, where you just form a clear picture of what you want and go after it. Instead, Ibarra advocates for “First act, then think.” We discover possibilities by doing—trying new activities, building new networks, finding new role models, and embracing chance encounters. A test-and-learn strategy.
Ibarra sums it up: “I know who I am when I see what I do.”
I can relate based on my experiences. In my 16 years working for Dell Technologies, I’ve had eight different roles. An average of a new job every two years. And it was a chance encounter in London in 2011 that led me to move from the U.K. to the UAE, beginning a new chapter of my life.
I’ve sampled a lot of different experiences, including operating a restaurant, advising a not-for-profit arts group, launching a website on how to live a deeper life, and being a running coach and ambassador for ASICS.
All these experiences have helped me get closer to the fit between the work I do and who I am.
Get curious, talk to people, try things out
To get closer to your own match quality, and build towards a more fulfilling career and life, here’s four actionable steps you can take:
Ignore gravity problems. Gravity problems are the things we can’t change. Stay away from these and don’t waste your time and energy. Just accept them and reframe them. If it’s not actionable, it’s not a problem. It’s a circumstance.
Create ideas about your future. Ask yourself what you want your life to look like five or ten years from now. Think about it from all angles. Where am I living? What kind of work do I want to be doing? Get a better sense of the life you desire. You can use lifestyle-centric career planning as a framework, and the 5Cs approach to help.
Prototype. To get closer to the life you desire, ask questions and try things out. Talk to people who’ve done it. Build and develop habits that support your ideas. You’ll better understand what’s important in your life—and what isn’t important; those are the things you can walk away from or change direction. It’s in the actions you get the real insights. You’re prototyping your life just like a designer, learning by living, gaining more confidence and awareness, helping you reflect and adjust as necessary, maximising your match quality.
Keep building your skills. Recognise and understand the strengths you’ve developed, as well as the skills in front of you. Don’t get hung up on passion or obsess about the dream job. Build your skills, get experiences, and use them as leverage in your career to push you towards things that resonate and fit.
We all progress at different rates
A fulfilling life is a rich collection of experiences, adventures, and failures that teach us important lessons. They strengthen us, help us understand ourselves better, and provide valuable insights on what we can do next.
People progress at different rates. Whatever stage you’re at, be comfortable and focus on what you can do next. Sometimes we need to persevere. Sometimes we need to abandon previous goals and change directions entirely.
If Van Gogh hadn’t failed repeatedly, quit consistently, yet persevered in his journey to find his place, the world today would have one less vase of sunflowers and one less starry night.