I remember being told as a child and young adult, “You’ll succeed, as long as you never give up!” And more so, I remember believing it. And it’s true in part, but there’s more to success than just persistence.
I remember this especially well from my time as a gymnast. From my first days doing somersaults and cartwheels until my last doing aerials and flips, every failure was met with a reassuring, “Don’t give up!” I remember hours and hours spent at the gym in order to spend the competitions staring at the podium from a distance. I remember crying in the bathroom during breaks at practice because the other girls were all catching on to the new move much faster than I was. My coach would see my red eyes when I came back and say, “It’s OK, you’ll get it as long as you don’t give up.”
And I bought it. I bought it because I loved gymnastics. I loved flipping through the air, I loved putting every ounce of strength I had into a single tumbling pass, even if I was never as fast or jumped as high as the other girls. I bought it because that statement told me that this wouldn’t always be the case. No one ever gave me reason to believe that I would never be able to do a triple full someday, so I kept trying. I kept trying for over 10 years. Even though, to be honest, I was awful at it, regardless of how much I practiced. But commitment, that’s what matters, right?
It got to the point where I dreaded going to practice. While I enjoyed the activity itself, every time I failed to do something it weighed down on me. I felt so tall and ungainly compared to the little girls who were at a higher level. The worst was at the end of each session, where there was an evaluation to judge if one could move up to the next level. By the time I was in high school, I’d been in the same level for years. At a certain point, my parents started asking me if I wanted to quit, but I was determined. I didn’t have a huge goal, but I had a goal and I wanted to achieve it. By that point I knew I was never going to be a great gymnast, but I wanted to feel like I accomplished something. All I wanted was to earn a medal for something other than participation.
But there’s a point at which “not giving up” turns into wasting time. It’s not a specific moment, or really quantifiable in any way, but at some point, the goal simply becomes unachievable. There was a point at which I realized my goal was not going to happen, except maybe through sheer luck. That realization made me think back through all of the hours of practice, trying to figure out at what point I had started wasting time. The whole time, I’d thought my mistake was not trying hard enough, when in reality the error was in not knowing when to quit.
Though I may have wasted a lot of time then, I learned an important lesson: quitting is OK. I learned it doesn’t make you a better person to keep pursuing something for which you have no talent just as an exercise in willpower.
