If you quit because you didn't succeed, you didn't succeed because quitting was an option..png

This weekend I was listening to a training given by a gal in our company. In many more words she said that people who quit because they didn’t succeed quit because quitting is an option they gave themselves.

This made me think back on two different scenarios in my life: Business Ownership & Marriage.

MARRIAGE

Years ago, when my nerve conditions were at their height there was a lot of stress put on our young marriage. We were in our mid-twenties, having gotten married at 23, and still figuring out how to navigate marriage and adult life. One day I was really upset and on the phone with my dad. Having been married to my mom for longer than i had been alive they had been through their fair share of tough times. That day he told me: You have to take quitting off the table. You can’t talk as if that is an option. That conversation often comes to mind when we have rough patches.

BUSINESS OWNERSHIP

In Fall of 2014, within one month of each other, I started a cookie business and a skincare business. One day I was headed on a road trip to visit family and my 10 month old was sleeping in the car. I was taking advantage of the silence, gazing out at the miles of vineyards in Paso Robles, where we were living at the time. Deep in anxious thought about my new skincare business, I vividly remember promising myself “I’m going to be coachable and I won’t quit”. Quitting couldn’t be an option because knew I needed this business to work. Even when I had internal struggles and was literally crying crocodile tears on my pillow in self-doubt and discouragement, quitting my skincare business was not an option. Today my skincare business is going strong, helping many people and providing an income for my family in a way I would have never imagined.

Cookies were a different story. I loved the idea of my cookie company. I worked my tail off and had fun with it. I took great pride in the fact that I built it all from the ground up. To top it off, they were damn tasty cookies too, if I do say so myself! One thing I never did with my cookies was have a firm conversation with myself that I wasn’t going to quit. When it got to the point where I needed to decide whether to scale up or quit altogether it was relatively easy for me to make the decision. I didn’t have to persevere because quitting was always an option on the table, even if I didn’t realize it at the time.