• Keep going or call it quit?

• Great ideas are not always original ideas

• Interesting read - Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance

Keep going or call it quit?

When we hit roadblocks in our lives, there's a common belief that we should “keep pushing and not quit”. It is not so difficult to see where this idea comes from. All around us are stories of great comebacks from failures and this pushes the narrative that we can turn around any bad situation if we do not quit. Nobody wants to be seen as a loser, so instead of looking at a situation logically and making a rational decision to quit, most people would rather “hang in there”, while their situation keeps deteriorating.

For their bravery, they get a pat on the back from anyone who sees just how much effort they put into keeping their business afloat. This may delay the inevitable, but if a business idea is truly tanking, holding onto it is more of a bad business decision than perhaps starting the business in the first place. At this point, most people are no longer driven by passion or the desire to be successful. All they are doing is striving to protect their self-image and avoid being seen as a loser, or worse, seeing themselves as failures.

However, this problem is not unique to entrepreneurs alone. When we are faced with two options - To keep pushing or call it quits - and decide to seek advice from those around us, it is not surprising that the majority of people will advise us to keep pushing. You hear words like, “Things are going to get better”. “You can’t quit now, you’ve come too far”. “You are closer to your goal than you think”.

All these could be coming from well-meaning individuals, but it does not eliminate the fact that it is more of a sentimental perspective than a rational one. Very few people approach challenges rationally and have the courage to say it the way it is. You may think they are insensitive to your situation, but they aren’t. In fact, they may be helping you in the long run, because sometimes, your best move is to call it quits and move on.

This may sound unorthodox to some people but you should know that quitting isn't always failure, and it could bring clarity if applied properly. To prove this let's go to the World of Sports and talk about the Sportsman Michael Jordan. During his career that spanned about 20 years, Michael Jordan retired three times from the NBA. The first time was in 1993. Jordan who had just lost his father said that he “lacked interest in basketball”

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Coming from someone who's considered one of the best basketballers of all time this was indeed a big surprise. Two years later Michael Jordan replied to several questions about his career with two words, “I'm back”. And indeed he was, because, after that, MJ won three consecutive championships between 1996 to 1998. Clearly, Michael Jordan's challenge was not physical but psychological, and he needed time to process it.

Sometimes when chasing our goals, we lose sight of the reason why we are chasing the goal. When this happens, we begin to question our motives. Anything could make us lose our reason - maybe we found ourselves in a difficult situation like not having enough money to fund our business or a personal tragedy like the loss of a loved one.

When we find ourselves in situations like these, what we need is clarity, and sometimes that means stepping back from everything to have a clearer view, a different perspective, or reaffirming your reasons before you continue. The difference between quitting and failure is that failure is not always a choice. We don't just decide to fail, but we can decide to quit, and this shows we have control over the situation.

Look at it this way, we have some of the best Technologies today, and yet most of these Technologies need to be recalibrated to maintain their accuracy. For instance, we may feel our smartphones become less responsive as we use them every day. When this happens one common solution that works 99% of the time is to restart the phone. Quitting helps us to recalibrate.

it's a period when we can stop momentarily and give ourselves time to think things through and if necessary follow a different approach to achieve our goals. If you look at it this way quitting is less of a failure and more like a strategic step toward success when things aren't going as we planned

Great ideas are not always original ideas

When Steve Jobs made that statement, he was rephrasing the words of a famous artist - Picasso. During his time. Picasso was famous not just for his paintings but also as a suspect in the theft of the Mona Lisa. Perhaps this is not so surprising, after all, it was Picasso who said: “Art is theft”. But of course, Picasso wasn’t speaking literally and neither did Steve Jobs when he rephrased one of Picasso’s famous lines many years later.

However, it is easy for people to draw parallels between the two men and assume that they both stole their creativity from somewhere. Jobs even bragged about it saying, “We (Apple) have always been shameless about stealing great ideas”.

So you can safely deduce from this statement that Jobs’s ideas were stolen, but that deduction won’t be entirely accurate. This may sound like a paradox, and yes it is. You see, the saying good art is copied and great art is stolen was only used by both men to emphasize the fact that great works of art were not often original ideas, but inspired by something that was already in existence.

Stealing in this context means adopting an idea and adding a few make-ups to it. This is completely different from copying someone else’s idea. Copying an idea implies that you changed nothing of the original idea. This is why copyright laws exist. But stealing has always been fair game. Steve Jobs stole the idea for the Macintosh GUI from Xerox and so did Bill Gates.

Although both tech moguls engaged in a serious feud for many years over who stole what from whom, Gates later cleared the air by responding to an AMA on Reddit that asked: "Did you copy Steve Jobs or did he copy you?"

Bill Gates replied;

"The main "copying" that went on relative to Steve and me is that we both benefited from the work that Xerox Parc did in creating graphical interface — it wasn't just them, but they did the best work. Steve hired Bob Belville, I hired Charles Simonyi. We didn't violate any IP rights Xerox had, but their work showed the way that led to the Mac and Windows."

Whether they stole the idea or not didn’t matter. What mattered in the end is that thanks to that, both men became wealthy beyond imagination. So if you are brainstorming for a business idea, you may consider looking at the archives of great business ideas already in existence and stealing something worthwhile.

Read more about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs feud here.

Avoiding stupidity is easier than seeking brilliance

If you are not a fan of Tennis like me, you may easily have skipped this article. But I assure you that it is less about the game of Tennis and more about how to win in life or business. The author Shane Parrish brilliantly breaks down the idea of a book written by Simon Ramo. If you don’t know who that is, you are forgiven. I didn’t know too.

It turns out Ramo had written a book called Extraordinary Tennis Ordinary Players. Ramo’s insight on the game of Tennis explains the difference between two types of games being played - WInner’s Game and Looser’s Game. According to him, professional players play the Winner’s game while Amateur players play the loser’s game. How, you may ask.

Here is how he puts it. Professionals don’t win by expecting their opponents to lose points. In other words, they don’t count on their opponents making a mistake in the game. So to win the game, a professional has to gain points (be a better player). On the other hand, amateurs win by hoping their opponents make silly mistakes.

Ramo summarized his discovery this; in a professional game, 80% of points are won, so the side with the most points gained, wins. In an amateur’s game, 80% of points are lost, so the side with the least losses wins. How does this relate to business? To answer that question, let me quote Charlie Munger.

“It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent. There must be some wisdom in the folk saying, “it is the strong swimmers who drown.”

What Munger was trying to say here is that avoiding mistakes is an easier take than trying to outsmart the competition. If you believe you are a great entrepreneur, you may soon find out that you are not. Whereas if you believe you are an amateur and instead play your game to avoid losing points, then you have the advantage that comes with playing safe.

Let me add here that playing safe is a long-term bet, a road that only a few dare to travel.