Keep pushing forward even when you feel like giving up. The regret of giving up will be greater than the temporary joy of not facing the roadblock. Don’t let temporary joy cause you permanent regret down the road. There are many times when the decision to walk away is irreversible.
One of my coworkers quit her job in December 2019. She was unsatisfied with how she wasn’t progressing as fast as she felt she deserved in her career. So she quit for another opportunity working for a smaller company with better compensation and title.
Guess what happened in March 2020? COVID happened. The company laid her off a couple months later. She found a job an entire year after the company laid her off. That’s a very long time to lose. While she did quit because she was unsatisfied with the level of progress and not because it was too hard, it was still the worst timing ever.
Had she kept pushing forward, she would have been much better off financially and mentally. It’s not a mentally comforting thing for a company to lay you off. One aspiring FIRE supporter got laid off with $2 million in the bank. He still felt like damaged goods even after that experience.
Whenever you’re about to quit, do not make any hasty decisions. Truly evaluate whether the next chapter is the right opportunity or not. Keep pushing forward. Give it just an additional six more months. If that doesn’t work, give it another six months but lay off your foot off the pedal.
Whether quickly or slowly, the important thing is to keep pushing forward.
How to Keep Pushing Forward
One thing you should keep pushing forward on is to gently tap that social share button and posting to your favorite social media! You could be the hero that helps your friends dig deep within themselves so that they don’t quit on their dreams. You’re making dreams come true!
In seriousness, let’s get into the actual how’s of moving forward in life.
1) Figure Out What’s Dragging You Down
Is it physiological? Is it mental? Whatever the reason is, there’s a completely unrelated reason that could be pinning you down from your goals. For me, it’s my eating and drinking habits. My stomach is highly sensitive to the food and drink that I put into it and I have to take immense care throughout the day to monitor it.
If I don’t, I feel sluggish, I feel angry, and I feel like something is dragging me down to be stuck in a single place for the rest of my life. That something is the food and drink that I put into my body that my stomach is working overtime to digest. It’s quite the eye-opener and changing my diet to be more accommodating helped tremendously.
The arguably best player in tennis, Novak Djokovic, has gluten sensitivity problems. After his diet and fitness was taken care of, he soared to heights that the world has never seen before. What’s dragging you down might not be any big factor. It may just be a simple thing such as your diet.
Whatever it is, take some vacation days and PTO to figure out what’s dragging you down. Take some time. It’s worth it. You may be burnt out and need to know how to handle burnout.
2) Remember You Are Just About to Strike Gold
With the combination of work stress, my diet finally getting to me, and a horrible boss, I almost quit my job in June 2021. My job was stressing me out but June 2021 was especially stressing me out. I almost turned in my two weeks resignation. I wrote it up on my personal laptop but didn’t submit it.
Since then, I changed my diet and made sure that all of my physiological needs have been taken care of. It’s done wonders for my mood and my ability to keep pushing forward. I kept remembering to do it for one more month and see if that’s feasible.
At the same time, I looked for any physiological signs that signaled what was wrong with my body. The combination between that and remembering the famous miner picture giving up just before striking some major diamonds convinced me to keep going. Since then, I’ve actually struck some literal gold.
My net worth increased by $25,000 or so since then. For reference, that is around how much I spend in an entire year. I count making my entire yearly expenses in a couple months as a huge win.
3) Don’t Let Temporary Pain Prevent Permanent Gain
When you’re burning the midnight oil, wondering whether you should be spending all your days away like that, project yourself out a year from now. Burning the midnight oil is the exception, not the norm. Out of the 252 working days or so, you don’t burn the midnight oil for more than 126 days out of the year.
Therefore, is the temporary joy of avoiding the minority of bad days worth it? Instead of focusing on the minority of bad days and giving up, why not focus on the majority of good days and keep pushing forward? You are poised to be at a better spot than 99% of people on Earth. As long as you don’t just give up.
You will feel pleasure in the short term of having zero responsibilities. In the long run, you will not feel such a way. A good way to solve the temporary pain is to take as many PTO days as you can. In 2021, I took 2 consecutive weeks off. I can’t even begin to tell you how beneficial that was for my mental health.
4) Take a Step Back to Move Two Steps Forward
If you are having trouble pushing forward for a day, then take a breather for an hour or so. Relax. Step away from the situation and recharge. Go for a walk and enjoy nature. If you are having trouble pushing forward for a month, then take a week off. Ask your manager to take your well deserved vacation days.
Continuous work hurts us way more than we realize. Not only do we lose productivity in the way of efficiency, we lose quality output as well. It’s always a smart idea to take a breather. Henry Ford conceded that humans actually require downtime in order to be productive.
Therefore, he implemented the weekend that we know and love today. Without weekends, the economy would decline significantly. Take some time for yourself. Don’t place your work or your boss above your well being. You will come out way farther ahead than if you just pulled an all nighter.
5) Keep a Positive Mentality to Keep Pushing Forward
I get it. It feels like the thousandth time that you had to stay later than normal. Or the thousandth time that your boss asked you to work on an ad hoc project even when you don’t have mental capacity to tackle the project. What is crucial now is to keep that positive mentality.
The positive mentality trick I use to keep pushing forward is to check my net worth graphs often. It gives me much joy when I find out all the work that I accomplished for the past year. When I thought reaching the place that I’m at today would be impossible.
That’s what convinced me to keep pushing forward for a few more months after my want to initially quit. That few more months of additional effort ridiculously helped me out. Now I am completely on track to reach new heights I never thought that I could reach.
A positive mentality does wonders.
6) The Pain of Regret Later is Greater than Pain You Endure Today
You have no idea how much I regret leaving my prior company. I was making $70,000 + $35,000 bonus potential. I’m currently making $107k + $10k bonus potential. However, if I had stuck with my prior job, there’s a great chance that I would be making $95k + $40k bonus potential today.
The benefits at my current company makes up for the potential increase in pay. However, that still doesn’t mean that I left a very significant amount of money on the table. I didn’t really know how to value my job back then. That was a very crucial mistake.
It’s quite absolutely painful to know that I gave up that much money on the table for a company that doesn’t really value me. I left because I had a boss that I couldn’t stomach. The company switched out that boss on the last day of my job. If I had kept pushing forward, I would be at an even better spot than I am now.
A painful lesson that sometimes, doing nothing is literally the best course of action.
7) Think About the Reward
Think just how much your life will be better when you actually push through and see things to the end. When you keep pushing forward, think about just how much your life will be better off by going through with it. Not only will you be unbelievably proud that you went through with it, you will be objectively better off.
So many of my friends who are extremely well paid told me, “I am willing to take a pay cut if it means a better work life balance”. Nope. I’ve faced that choice before and I can honestly say that I would be completely unhappy getting paid less than I know I deserve.
I’m so glad that I still stayed at a high income bracket but still at a stressful job. Keep pushing forward and you will question why you were about to give up in the first place. Hard work is hard for a reason. The rewards are absolutely worth it in the end.
8) When All Else Fails, Use Brute Force to Keep Pushing Forward
As an absolute last resort, just make it a permanent absolute rule for yourself that you shouldn’t give up. If you’re having thoughts of quitting, force yourself to stop thinking in such a manner. Try it with your absolute will and every sense of being to give every bit of effort that you possibly can.
You didn’t come this far to only come this far.
When I was younger, I used fear as a motivation to keep pushing forward. Afraid that I would end up homeless. Afraid that I could not even afford food. That gave me the kick to keep going at all costs and any excuses would be thrown out the window. It was through sheer willpower to continue putting in ridiculous effort to mastering my craft.
Give a good kick in your pants to keep pushing forward. Light a fire under you to motivate you to keep going. Failure is quite literally not an option. Think of it as a life or death situation, where if you don’t make it happen, you don’t eat. It may sound overly dramatic but it’s worked wonders for me.
My Story of Giving Up Multiple Times
When I was in college, I desperately wanted an internship every summer. Do you know what I did to make that happen? I applied to 100+ companies every single year and got rejected by 99+ companies. However, but that one company who said yes made all the difference in the world.
I could have given up at the 99th application. It would have been completely fair to say that I gave it a fair and a good amount of effort then. However, I didn’t. I refused to give up and sent in that 100th application. That made a complete difference in my life.
After that internship, subsequent internships became much easier to obtain. I still keep in contact with my former internship bosses. One executive liked me so much that he’s been trying to hire me every so often. I wouldn’t have that opportunity had I not gotten that one opportunity that domino’d subsequent opportunities.
Don’t give up until you get what you want out of life. During 2018, I lost $20,000 gambling in the casino. I also lost significant money because the S&P 500 went negative for the year. Even after a 50%+ savings rate that included a $20,000 after-tax bonus, my net worth only increased by $16,000 for the year.
That was the closest I came to quitting the financial independence journey. However, I kept pushing forward and kept contributing to the S&P 500 without fail through my retirement accounts. That horrifying event is completely behind me now.
It severely scarred me. However, because I kept pushing forward, I am sitting high on the throne thanking my past self for doing what I did and never losing faith. Ok, I may have lost faith but I didn’t show it through actions.
Keep Pushing Forward and be Amazed
You will generate UNBELIEVABLE results if you keep pushing forward. The one who wins isn’t the one who came up with the most complicated formula to success. The one who wins is the one who just stayed in the game while they saw others quit. One of my friends’ company department had 5 employees.
4 of which who left the company for a better opportunity. Can you guess what happened to the one who stayed behind? That’s right! She got promoted. If you want to win, you don’t have to do anything complicated in order to get there. You just have to outlast the competition, quietly and patiently biding your time.
Other people are going to do the work for you and leave on their own because they couldn’t practice patience. All you have to do is get your bucket ready for when the profits rain down from the sky so you can capture every last bit of it. Stay in the game and ignore others to leave the game.
That’s all it takes to get ahead. No need to learn how to practice office politics, though it helps. No need to create a genius product that the team will use for years on end. Just keep playing the game for hours on end and outlast the competition. It’s not that hard to do so, anyway.
So think about this the next time that you want to quit. Think about everything that you’re giving up. All the hours that you put in already. Sure, it may be a “sunk cost” but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored. Some sunk costs are crucial.
Keep pushing forward and dig deep within yourself to do so. I am beyond grateful to my past self for putting me in my current position.
How to Keep Pushing Forward List:
- Figure out what’s dragging you down
- Remember you are about to strike gold
- Don’t let temporary gain prevent permanent gain
- Take a step back to move two steps forward
- Keep a positive mentality to keep pushing forward
- The pain of regret later is greater than the pain you endure today
- Think about the reward
- When all else fails, use brute force
