Why Do People Give Up and Others Persevere?
People don’t quit because they “can’t” achieve their goals. They quit because they felt a magnetic pull towards something else more rewarding in the short term. One reason for this is that they never expected failure to happen in the first place. For people who have only known success, the first sign of struggle can be the most difficult challenge of their lives but doesn’t have to be so.
On the other side, it was found that some people never stop trying. They have a fierce will to achieve their objectives and never give up. These people are like bulldogs who refuse to let go of a bone between their teeth. The harder you take the bone out of his jaws, the more he bites down with a vice-like hold.
What is the distinction between these two categories of individuals? According to psychologists, there is an answer. The belief is that to be successful in your goals, you must: “There is no such thing as failure; only feedback exists. There is no such thing as “failure,” only “results.”
Many people may second-guess themselves and bail out or stop simply because what they attempt at first doesn’t succeed. They see it as a lifelong loss, but all they need is a shift in attitude, a shift in thinking, or a “reframe.”
They might tell themselves, “I generated a result” and “This is only temporary,” instead of “This is a failure.” This shift in viewpoint will affect how they feel as well as how they mentally absorb and explain the event. Instead of being a failure, it becomes a learning opportunity and important input for a course correction, motivating continuing activity and progress.
Quitting and persevering are all about the outcomes people get and how people interpret them.
Dr Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted ground-breaking research on this topic and wrote a book about it called Learned Optimism. The difference between those who give up and others who persevere and never quit, according to Dr Seligman, is what he calls “explanatory style.” Explanatory style, he explained, is the way we explain or interpret undesirable occurrences or failures.
People who give up frequently have a permanent explanation style. Let’s take a Gym Goer, for instance, they may reach a stalemate in their weight loss and explain it by claiming that “diets never work” or “I have lousy genetics, so I’ll always be big.” These justifications indicate that they will last forever.
Others have had similar plateaus and challenges, but they explain them differently. “I had far too much cheat food this week,” they say, or “I haven’t found the perfect diet for my body type yet.” These results’ explanations imply that they are transient.
People who see unfavourable outcomes as permanent failure are more likely to give up easily and to extrapolate their “failure” to other aspects of their lives, including their self-esteem while the people who never quit regard problems and hurdles as transient and wonderful learning opportunities. Success is unavoidable if you learn from your mistakes, avoid repeating what didn’t work in the previous attempt, and refuse to give up.
