Persistence Has an Evil Twin

Persistence is one of the most genuinely valuable traits an entrepreneur can develop, and I do not say that as a platitude. Most worthwhile things take longer and are harder than expected. The evidence that something is working rarely arrives on schedule. If you change direction every time something becomes difficult, you will never stay with anything long enough to discover whether it might have worked.

I have experienced this directly — some of the most meaningful breakthroughs I have had came after long stretches where very little seemed to be happening, where the temptation to reconsider was real and the reasons for continuing were not yet obvious.

But persistence has an evil twin, and the dangerous thing about the relationship is that from the inside, they look identical.

Stubbornness in Costume

Stubbornness feels like persistence. It feels like staying committed, refusing to quit, the kind of determination that separates people who eventually succeed from people who gave up too early. Both are experienced as resistance to the pressure to stop.

The difference only becomes visible from the outside, or in retrospect — usually painful retrospect.

I have pursued business ideas that were simply not achievable at the time I was pursuing them. I did not have the foundation, the resources, the technology, or sometimes even the market required to make them real. And I stayed with them considerably longer than I should have, because what I was doing felt like persistence and not like stubbornness, and the two feelings are, from the inside, indistinguishable.

Is This Hard, or Is This Wrong?

Discovering that you have been living in a productive-feeling fantasy is one of the more humbling experiences I know of. But it is also a powerful teacher. It forces a question that I think is one of the most valuable in entrepreneurship, and one of the hardest to answer honestly: is this hard, or is this wrong?

Persistence and discernment together are what separate someone who eventually succeeds from someone who exhausts themselves chasing something that was never going to work.

Knowing which one you are doing at any given moment may be the most difficult skill in the whole enterprise of building something.