Moving On Is Not Giving Up
No business
professional in history has ever had a perfect record. Though you only set
goals for you and your team with the absolute best of intentions, sometimes
you may find yourself coming up short. Everyone from our parents to our
teachers to our mentors has told us over and over again to "never give
up, never surrender," when sometimes, you have to do exactly that. The
key to coming out all the better for it involves knowing how to identify that
moment of surrender when it does arrive, and how to best handle what comes
immediately after.
Look for the Signs
The best way to know when to move on from an objective in the world of
business involves taking a moment to observe the world around you. How much
time have you spent trying to accomplish this task? How much money have you
expended trying to do this one particular thing? Would that time, money,
and energy be better served if it were reallocated elsewhere within your
organization?
At a certain point, you will start to feel diminishing returns. You've put
your all into something and success is still just as far away as it was
when you started. When you have that moment of clarity, the best thing you
can do is look deep inside yourself. Do you really believe that you can
pull off the challenge in front of you, or do you just hope that you can?
If you fall into the latter category, it may be time to move on.
Moving On Doesn't Mean You've Failed
The most important thing to understand about when you should move on from
an objective you just can't quite accomplish has to do with what happens
next. If you set a goal for yourself and come up short of that mark, a lot
of things have happened -but failure is not one of them.
You can choose to look at it that way if you'd like, but doing so actually
limits the power of the moment you have in front of you. Maybe the
objective you set wasn't the right objective in the first place, and
everything leading up to this point has been trying to tell you that. It's
a scenario you can see time and time again with some of the most successful
companies in the history of business.
Apple, for example, had been set on releasing a smartphone for years - or
at least a "smartphone" as per the definition of that term in
2005. Steve Jobs and his team tried, and tried and tried again, and
eventually released something called the ROKR E1, a phone designed in
conjunction with Motorola that was basically a regular phone with iTunes
connectivity built in. The results were disastrous - a rare black mark on
Apple's otherwise top notch record. Jobs had set a goal for himself and had
failed to accomplish it the way he wanted.
But instead of saying "Apple and phones are not meant for each
other," he thought differently. He realized that what he really failed
to do was find the right hardware company to partner with to achieve this
goal. He realized that by handling both the hardware and the software
in-house, he could get at what he really wanted in the first place. Apple
would go on to release the iPhone less than two years later and the rest,
as they say, is history.
In the End
When you set goals for yourself, you always do so with the best of
intentions. Remember that Albert Einstein's definition of insanity was
"doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different
results." Sometimes, you need to know when to try harder and when to
try something else. However, moving on doesn't mean that you're a failure -
it just means that you've cleared away the cobwebs, reassessed your
priorities, and are ready to redirect that energy into something much more
positive and appropriate.
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