It might seem like perseverance is a good thing. We’ve been told to persist in the face of odds. Yet, there are times when you should stop. How do you know when to stop? And why bother to persevere when failure is waiting around the corner? Find out why perseverance can be a real pain, and when it can be a blessing. Enjoy this episode on perseverance and yes, enjoy the music. In this episode Sean talks about Part 1: The link between failure and perseverance Part 2: Is there a way to know when to stop? Part 3: Why perseverance could do with a coach To read this online:  http://www.psychotactics.com/why-persevere-fails/ To tell a friend: http://www.psychotactics.com/general/podcast-friend/ ===================== Should You Give Up? Or Should You Persist? When you get to your office and want to print some material, what do you do? You’re likely to turn on your computer, hit the print button and then voilà, out come a crisp, laser-printed copy of whatever was on your computer screen. Back in 1969, an optical engineer called Gary Starkweather thought the same way. “One morning I woke up and I thought, why don’t we just print something out directly?” Starkweather said. “But when I flew that past my boss he thought it was the most brain-dead idea he had ever heard. He basically told me to find something else to do. The feeling was that lasers were too expensive. They didn’t work that well. Nobody wants to do this, computers aren’t powerful enough. And I guess, in my naïveté, I kept thinking, He’s just not right—there’s something about this I really like. It got to be a frustrating situation. He and I came to loggerheads over the thing, about late 1969, early 1970. I was running my experiments in the back room behind a black curtain. I played with them when I could. He threatened to lay off my people if I didn’t stop. I was having to make a decision: do I abandon this, or do I try and go up the ladder with it?” A Starkweather kind of decision is the kind of decision we have to make, when facing our lives, but also our business How do we know whether we should persist or give up? Will we meet with success or failure? And is failure one of the goals? Should we really accept failure as a benchmark that we’re moving ahead? In this series we’re going to take a hard-nosed look at three areas of perseverance. We’ll examine 1) The link between failure and perseverance 2) Is there a way to know when to stop? 3) Why perseverance could do with a coach 1) Let’s start with the link between failure and perseverance Imagine you were a company that failed repeatedly. You create a tablet device that was at best, disappointing. You try your hand at a peer-to-peer payment system like Paypal, and it fails. You start up an auction site similar to eBay, and that too needs to be shut down. You then get into the phone business but lose over $170 million in a single year. And ten solid years after you’ve run the business, your net profit is barely 2.8%. Should you give up? Well, this company chose to soldier on despite the odds Almost all of us are likely to have used the services of this company at one time or another. We’re not talking about some unknown, nondescript company. We’re talking about Amazon.com, the retailing giant. The reality is that Amazon’s profit margin is wafer thin and has continued to be that way for an agonisingly long time. In early 2016, CEO Jeff Bezos announced that his gamble had paid off. He spoke excitedly about Amazon Web Services (AWS) which had reached $10 billion in sales and was now generating 52% of Amazon’s total profit for that quarter. What this meant was that a single arm of Amazon, no, not the retail arm, but the cloud hosting section was the real winner. In short what Bezos was mildly gloating about was the fact that his perseverance had paid off. A similar perseverance experiment paid off in Cupertino, California In 1993, Apple Inc. launched the Newton MessagePad. The MessagePad, the first series of personal digital