Here’s Why People Quit (And Why You Shouldn’t If You Want To Become Unstoppable)
Quitting is easy and everybody can do it. When faced with challenges our first choice is to go back to our comfort zone. We hate pain. Our brain is structured in a way that makes it act as opposition to any little change in our numerous patterns. It wants to follow the same old patterns it has been accustomed to.
For the brain the usual is constant and it will find a way and every way it has to resist the change we are trying to achieve. Whether it is trying to stop a smoking habit, eating late at night, obsessive social media, addiction to pornography, alcohol or whatever the change may be. It is hard and required more than will power to effect a change because the real enemy is the one we see in the mirror. We are our greatest opposition.
Throwing in the towel ,giving up to soon, quitting on your dreams feels good momentarily but sooner or later you begin to feel the pain of regret and no anti depressant can do any good because you made the choice to stop when you needed to push one more time. Here are some of the tragedies of quitting;
• The pain of regret
• Accumulated fatigue resulting from unaccomplished tasks
• Your goals remain in the fairytale dream stage
• You lie to yourself that you are not enough
• You reinforce your alibis and suffocate your trust in self
This should not be you because the fact that you are reading this means that you are taking a conscious commitment to personal development. You want to see your goals and aspirations come to reality or maybe like me you are sick and tired of quitting and you say. Way to go, and you say, it’s high time I committed to this goal and see its actualization. Are you a quitter? Do you want to soar with the champions who stick with it till they win it? This post is for you. Let’s cut to the chase.
1. Time
There is no shortcut to success or a thing such as an overnight success. The road to success is not straight, easy or for the faint hearted. It will take time. You will need to learn to build habits such as hard work, commitment, consistency, grit, doggedness, failing forward, making mistakes, learning and trying again.
These processes take time and require consistency. It will take time, days, months and even years. To master a skill or become an expert in a field it is said that you need 10,000 hours of practise, intentional practise, not just a whiling away of time and hoping that you will learn how to play a guitar because you have owned it since you were 15.
If you don’t spend the time to learn your chords, learn the progressions, the finger picking patterns, practise, practise and practise, you will remain at the same level 10,000 hours later. Time will keep moving and until you begin to invest your time in the pursuit of the things you desire, you’ll wonder where all the time went.
“Not doing anything is the same as intending to do something but never actually doing it.” – Thomas Oppong
When you take the actions that propel you towards your goals then you are using your time wisely by putting in the work required to become what you must.
2. Pain
Pain is a perspective. It is how you view what you are passing through at the moment. The amount of worth you attach to the current condition to the outcome required. An athlete will endure gruelling workouts and want more because she wants to train her body for the marathon and the present condition is worth sacrificing for being a world record holder.
W.E.B Du Bois said it right, the most important thing to remember is this: to be ready at any moment to give up what you are for what you might become.
Most people want something but they are not willing to give it the work required, they don’t want the pain but want the profit of the painful process. When I started working out, I was inspired by the fit individuals I saw around me in the gym but when I tried to work out with them I always stopped when the pain became unbearable.
I had to tell myself that if I wasn’t willing to go through the pain, then maybe I didn’t really want the six packs and a well built muscles I have always fantasised about. No pain no gain. When you are ready to embrace the pain only then will you get the desired results because pain is the heat that cooks the food of achievement. You can have all the necessary ingredients for a food but without the heat you might as well watch the food all day and go hungry. For success, pain is the heat that puts all others in place.
3. Desire
When a thing is not formed clearly in your subconscious, it is regarded as sheer want, wish, and fantasy. If wishes were horses beggars would ride. Only beggars with a desperate obsessive burning passion to see their want actualised get to ride horses. Desire transcends want. It becomes a need, something you can’t do without-air, which you need to survive on.
Desire clarifies your why, and when you have a strong enough why, you will ultimately find a how to enable see your desire come to realization. Without a desire, it becomes so easy to stop at 50 push ups when your target is 200. Without desire to become the best you will be satisfied with your comfort zone and will not take on new and challenging tasks that broaden your horizon and sharpen your minds. Desire is knowing what you want and reaching out for it consistently until you get it because when you seek gold you won’t stop digging when you hit bronze or maybe you find a large chunk of sliver covered up in dirt. No. This is not you with a desire. You’ll keep going, keep digging till you get gold and when you do you’ll know because your desire would have been fulfilled.
4. Consistency
With consistency you can achieve anything, only if you are willing to accept the challenge to do it upon the pattern you have set without fail. The power of consistent rain drops can scatter a rock. You can accomplish any task if you keep at it. it might take days, months, years and yes it will take time but no matter how long it takes if you keep performing your consistent actions the compound effect will actualize and one straw will break the camel’s back, one hit will break the rock, your last set of 500 words daily will provide the epilogue for the first draft of your novel.
There is no time limit before you achieve success. You must not quit because you’ve tried for a couple of times and failed. The key is to keep trying, the more you try, the closer you’ll get to success. If you quit, however, you have lost, failure is inevitable. On the other hand, if you continue you might just need one more try before the bulb will be lit, before you get the perfect idea for an article, before you get a letter from the publisher to publish your first book. The only failure is in quitting. Don’t quit. Give it all you’ve got today and repeat tomorrow. 
