The Dip: The extraordinary benefits of knowing when to quit (and when to stick)

by Seth Godin

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.

Every time you switch lines, you’re starting over. In your search for a quick fix, you almost certainly waste time and you definitely waste energy jumping back and forth. There are queues everywhere. Do you know an entrepreneur-wannabe who is on his sixth or twelfth new project? He jumps from one to another, and every time he hits an obstacle, he switches to a new, easier, better oppor -tunity. And while he’s a seeker, he’s never going to get anywhere.

The businesses we think of as overnight successes weren’t. We just didn’t notice them until they were well baked.

One reason people feel really good after they quit a dead-end project is that they discover that hurting one’s pride is not fatal. You work up the courage to quit, bracing yourself for the sound of your ego being ripped to shreds—and then everything is okay.

“We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we’d make a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better.”

If you’ve got a small business and you are keeping a few customers happy, it’s fine to keep on keeping on because, over time, those customers can get you new customers. You can measure your progress by referrals and sales growth. Your consistency and market presence, all by themselves, are enough to justify your efforts (sometimes).