How do I know when to persevere, and when to walk away?

It is an agonizing question to answer. 

Do I give up on my dreams? Or keep chasing them?

Am I being resilient? Or am I being naive? 

The answer, of course, is that it depends.

Arriving at the answer means evaluating your intention, level of effort, and actions. 

Why are you pursuing this in the first place?

Maybe it’s a dream you’ve had since childhood like becoming a professional athlete or an astronaut. It could be a passion like opening a coffee shop or creating a top-selling video game. It might even be your persistence in finding a cloud architecture solution to a complex data issue no one else thinks is possible. 

Regardless of the pursuit, you must be clear on why you want to achieve this particular outcome. What importance does it hold in your heart? 

We live in a culture where we’re taught anything is possible. We’re taught to think big, dream big, and achieve bigger. Seldom are we taught to slow down and evaluate why we want this dream in the first place. 

Is your identity tied to it? Who are you seeking validation from? What would failure to achieve it mean to you? Do you feel entitled to achieve it? Is this pursuit an escape from a more difficult reality?

It’s uncomfortable to pause and go through this exercise of self-reflection. The culture around us makes us feel like the moment we identify something we are passionate about, we should immediately move into action mode to make it happen. 

What will it take to get there?

If we fail to properly assess our intentions, then we will fail at understanding the amount of work needed to achieve something. To put it another way, once we become infatuated with a goal, we will underestimate the amount of work needed to achieve it. 

Just as we are told to follow our dreams, we are told we can achieve them if we work hard enough. We’re also led to believe that if we do the work, we deserve the achievement of our goal. This fetishiziation of grit is built on survivorship bias and disconnected from reality. 

For every person that moved out to Los Angeles and worked as a waiter before becoming a huge movie star, there are thousands of others who failed along the exact same path. We are quick to share the stories of the underdog who overcomes the odds, never takes no for an answer, and succeeds. We never hear the stories of people who ruined their lives and never saw the finish line. 

I’m a sucker for the show Shark Tank. It always gets me when a couple comes on the show, and brags about being all in. They’ve maxed out their credit cards, sold the house, moved into their parents basement, and bet everything on the success of their product (something like a shower cap with a towel built into it) turning into a billion dollar business. 

What is the cost of failure? At what point do we say enough is enough? That brings us to the last question. 

Is the effort worth it?

Answering this question requires a mindset shift. We must move from being destination oriented to being process oriented. 

Will the effort I put forward be fruitful even if I do not achieve the end objective? 

Consider the IT worker tackling this cloud architecture problem. It could easily be argued that even if they do not ultimately solve the problem, they would still learn invaluable insights along the way that could be leveraged in an alternate solution. 

This is even more clear if we consider a person who has dreamt of memorizing the Qur’an or has a goal of learning Arabic. The pursuit in and of itself has its own benefit and reward, even if they fall short of the end goal. 

But what if the goal is the dream of owning your own business and insisting it be with the shower-cap towel widget you invented? True, you may learn some stuff along the way, but is it really worth it? 

One way to know the answer to that is by setting a tripwire beforehand. Identify the circumstances under which you promise yourself to quit before starting. An example would be to say that if you aren’t able to complete coding the first version of your video game and get 100,000 downloads within 18 months, then you will quit. This helps mitigate both emotional bias and the sunk-cost fallacy that can cause us to continue down an irrational path. 

What sacrifices are you willing to make? This could be financial, but it could also be relationships. Is it worth sacrificing a social life in order to stay home every night working on a screenplay? What happens if your parents tell you that spending your life savings on a shower-cap towel gizmo is dumb? Will you consider them toxic haters and cut them out? Or will you have the capacity to recognize that your own dream may be toxic?

What if the dream is going to an ivy league school? Are you willing to make the sacrifice of taking on a certain amount of debt? Moving away from family who legitimately says they need you to stay? It’s possible you may arrive at the answer that the sacrifice is worth it. The point here is that you go through a reflective process and evaluate the action. Many people will forego that process and assume they need to do whatever it takes for the self-actualization of their own dream. 

Seeking qualified validation is another way to determine if the effort is worth it. If I am chasing my dream of being a professional basketball player, I need to get expert feedback. If that expert feedback tells me that there is zero chance of an undersized middle aged guy who can’t jump making the league - then I know that spending 4 hours a day working on ballhandling drills is probably not the way for me showcase my resiliency. 

On the other hand, if I dream of owning my own BBQ restaurant, and I start to win some local competitions and get catering requests - it could be a signal that my dream may be more realistic. 

Connect every action back to the akhirah. 

The Qur’an reminds us that life is fragile, “Tell them, too, what the life of this world is like: We send water down from the skies and the earth’s vegetation absorbs it, but soon the plants turn to dry stubble scattered about by the wind: God has power over everything (18:45).”

We must be purposeful about where we dedicate our time, energy, and focus. We should be careful about pursuing something that is ultimately frivolous regardless of how much we desire it. 

Even while pursuing something that is generally related to this world, dedicate yourself to things that add value to others in both process and outcome.  

Having the intentionality to go against our own desires, even when we might not see anything wrong with them, requires its own kind of endurance. It reminds me of the following hadith explaining the ayah ‘you are responsible for your own souls [5:105]’, “No, enjoin one another to do what is good and forbid one another to do what is evil. But when you see greed being obeyed, vain desires being followed, worldly interests being preferred, everyone being charmed with his opinion, then care for yourself, and leave alone what people in general are doing; for ahead of you are days which will require endurance…” (Abu Dawud).