Giving up is a sign of weakness.

You need the persistence to succeed.

You’ve probably heard it many times before.

But what if I told you that sometimes the best thing you can do is abandon your idea?

In this blog post, you’ll find out how to recognise that it’s time to move on and search for your success elsewhere.

Running your business is not all roses

Whether you’re a freelancer, small business owner, or an employee working on a side hustle—at some point you will hit the wall. You will doubt your skills. Your talents. Your ideas. A dark cloud will cover your thoughts and make you believe that all your efforts are futile. A never-ending resistance will force you to question your goals and undermine your determination to succeed.

That’s when you start thinking: Am I still going in the right direction? Maybe after 100 rejections, it’s time to give up?

But how would you know that number 101 won’t be successful?

You don’t.

In most cases, the decision of whether you should give up comes from your intuition. Statistics, cold-hearted calculations, and long talks with your friends or mentors might be helpful, but ultimately, the right answer lies within you.

How to find it?

It’s not easy to tell between the voice of your inner critic and your inner wisdom. But there are some ways to search for the right queues.

Here are two methods that worked well for me and my colleagues:

No. 1: Look inside

Abandon your project or business idea for the whole day to gain some perspective. Change your surroundings, work from a different place, or don’t work at all, travel to a new location, spend time with people you care about, or engage in your hobbies.

Even better: move. Whether it’s a short walk through a park, a tiring gym session, or a mild yoga class – choose what suits you best and stay mindful.

Usually, the best decisions and ideas pop up when your mind is ready to receive them. When it’s not cluttered by “what-ifs”, “let’s try agains”, or “I should haves”. Movement and meditation are proven methods to clear your thoughts.

No. 2.: Break it down

Imagine yourself in both scenarios. The first one: you keep pushing and fighting for your idea. The second one: you give up and shift your focus elsewhere.

The next step is to observe how you feel about both decisions. You might be relieved, disappointed, confident, motivated, or sad. Maybe you’ll experience all these emotions at the same time. Take your decision based on the emotional state you’d rather be in.

If that’s still too vague, you can list the pros and cons of both scenarios. You can also take your analysis further by assigning a priority value to each item. That’s how you can come up with a somewhat reasonable result.

For example, you might feel uncertain whether it’s a good idea to keep building your online learning platform. Your inner wisdom search combined with your pros and cons analysis tells you to stick to your goal, but the major drawback is the money you need to keep investing in your idea. Now you know that to stay motivated you have to find effective ways to reduce costs. Alternatively, you can look for innovative methods to promote your content, or maybe team up with someone who can help you out.

Are you still passionate about it?

There are many different reasons you may decide to give up on your business idea or the freelancing career altogether. It could be due to the lack of money, lack of time, or lack of patience to wait until your brilliant thoughts convert into a profitable reality. Very often, by sticking to our ideas, we lose something much more valuable: our passion.

If your business activity, products, services, idea, or career doesn’t intrigue you anymore, it might be the right moment to make some changes. Without passion, you won’t be able to keep pushing toward your goal. You’ll lose your motivation to improvise or adjust on the go to figure out how to make your idea work.

So, whatever you do with your business idea, make sure you’re passionate about it!

P.S. Do you want to find out more about other strategies for running a successful freelance business?

Grab a copy of my new book, “Successful Freelancer’s Mindset“, to discover a smooth road to your rewarding freelancer’s life.

Dorota Pawlak

Dorota helps digital brands infuse their content with a local touch. She is a localization consultant, translator specialized in IT, prompt engineer, and a book author. Dorota teaches online courses on localization, writes for her blog and a Medium publication. She also runs a Small Biz AI, a Substack newsletter for freelancers and small business owners ready to discover handy AI tools.