Contrary to "persistence", what most people regard as failure and giving up halfway is "giving up". It seems that this is not a very good thing. But actually giving up doesn't mean failure. If you can re-examine your goals and correct the direction of progress, you can often achieve good results. For example, Fan Li, who gave up his wealth to do business in the sea, is known as the "business sage"; Lu Xun, who gave up medicine and went to literature. However, many times, even though we know that we are wrong, we still can't make up our minds to give up. Why is this?
There are several reasons for the analysis:
1, from the perspective of traditional culture
In our traditional culture, persistence has always been regarded as a virtue, while giving up seems to be the performance of the weak. Knowledge in books, historical events and famous sayings all show that persistence is a virtue. All successful cases clearly show that in the face of difficulties, only by persisting and never giving up can we win the final victory. "Failure is the mother of success." "Where there is a will, there is a way." Countless people who start over in the face of failure are using these two sentences to motivate themselves. We take "never give up" as an inspirational story to motivate ourselves. Many people associate giving up with failure and dare not give up for the sake of "success" in others' eyes.
2. Analyze from the way the brain works.
Anyone who has read The Speed of Thinking knows that Kahneman thinks that our brains have two ways to make decisions: fast and slow.
The commonly used unconscious "system 1" relies on emotion, memory and experience to make quick judgments and choices about things, thus making quick responses to the current situation. However, the system 1 is also gullible. It adheres to the principle of "seeing is believing" and allows illusions such as aversion to loss and optimistic prejudice to guide us to make wrong choices. Unusual consciousness system 2, we must analyze and solve problems by mobilizing attention. It relies on logic, mathematics and probability to make judgments and choices about things. It is slow and laborious, but it makes us less prone to mistakes. You can be lazy and often don't call system 2, but take a shortcut and directly use the intuition of system 1 to judge the result.
The system 1 is confident and relaxed when processing information. Because of the way the brain works, people will try to avoid thinking hard, reduce self-loss, and be easily inspired and influenced by the environment. She doesn't care much about the correctness of the answer, but prefers to act according to her most comfortable way and idea. The intuitive way the brain works makes us persevere in our goals, which also makes it easier for people to stick to them.
3. Analysis from the perspective of human nature
It is human nature to like to stay in an area that makes you comfortable. A comfort zone is the most familiar and comfortable place for you, where our anxiety level will be very low. Everyone is lazy. Everyone wants to enjoy comfort and convenience, but they don't like hard work and trouble. This has also become an excuse for persistence. If you need to keep improving, you should get out of your comfort zone. However, going out of the comfort zone means that you will encounter unfamiliar and uncertain factors, and people will be afraid of their own uncertain things, and the degree of anxiety will increase, which will lead to stress reactions. Many people insist that they are actually afraid of going out of the comfort zone, going to the learning zone and challenging the panic zone. Everyone is most adapted to familiar emotional patterns, whether it makes us happy or not. Blind persistence is caused by human inertia, fear and anxiety.
4. From a psychological point of view.
? The paradox of sunk cost will make persistence deeply involved and it is difficult to give up "sunk cost". The most important thing is the dedication of human nature and the mentality of wanting to be rewarded. Pay manpower, material resources, energy, time, money ... If you choose to give up, you may be nothing. But as long as you stick to it and gamble, you may get a return, even if the chance is small. In this case, we tend to pay attention to what we have paid and how much we have paid, and we can't treat the "sunk cost" rationally.
This involves another concept of psychology-endowment effect, which was first put forward by Seiler, a Nobel laureate in economics, in 1980: once a person owns something, he will feel that the value of the item is particularly great, much greater than before. For example, a used car that has been used for five years has the same brand, and there is no difference between old and new. Which one do you think can fetch a higher price? Of course it's in our own hands!
Because of this sense of aversion to loss, it is difficult for us to make rational judgments and decisions on "sunk cost", and it is easy to suffer from loss. Maybe we know it's useless to keep going, but we still keep going with the mentality that there is still a chance to save it. For example, a pair of lovers have been together for a long time and have many good memories. When they are ready to get married, one or both parties find that there seem to be many inappropriate places between us, or they already feel that they don't love each other. However, it is often because everyone has spent time, affection and, of course, money to run this relationship. Even though there are too many incongruities and even a premonition of future conflicts, when it comes to marriage, they are still unwilling to end it. For example, if you invest a lot in starting a business, but you can't get a good return all the time, some people will choose to continue investing because they invested so much before, but the result may be greater losses; There are also broken marriage relationships, but because of having children, choosing to continue to maintain them has caused greater pain and misfortune to families and children.
The above four points are the reasons why it is difficult for people to make a decision to give up. They can't stand the loss of time, energy and even money. They like to stay in the comfort zone and are afraid of the uncertainty caused by giving up. The brain prefers lazy and intuitive ways of thinking. More importantly, everyone recognizes that culture exerts pressure on persistence, making it harder for people to give up.
In fact, giving up is not a last resort, but life wisdom that can help you stop loss and find a new direction. For achieving life goals, the correct "giving up" is more important than the wrong "persistence".
So what do you need to consider before deciding to give up?
1. Know yourself well.
Only stop loss in time, give up wrong persistence, plan life path correctly and start over, will life be more meaningful. To give up correctly, the most important premise is only one, that is to know yourself, know yourself, know your mind, and know what you really want. Giving up can bring you lasting happiness and meaning, not a short moment.
Psychology divides personality into the following two types:
Action personality-when you feel stressed, you can adjust your emotions, cheer up and form a positive and clear self-image. State-oriented personality-when feeling pressure, it is easy to be dominated by emotions, overwhelmed by negative emotions, sensitive to external stimuli, and difficult to make decisions. Such people are not easy to give up. Before you give up, you should really know yourself. Only when you really know yourself can you persist when you persist and give up when you give up.
Determine the goal
Learn to tell whether your goal is approaching or avoiding, and you will know whether to persist or give up. Being close to the goal is what I want to strive for and achieve. The advantage is that it can promote personal growth. Avoidant goals are goals that don't want to happen. Its main advantage is to help you survive. For example, they are afraid of unemployment and choose to stay in state-owned enterprises that cannot pay wages. Afraid of the pressure of public opinion, choose to wait in the broken marriage relationship. Avoidant goals have seriously hindered one's pursuit of ideals in today's society. If we persist in this evasive goal at present, we must give up decisively.
Corresponding to the two goals, we will have two kinds of motives: approaching and avoiding. Approaching means "what have I done to achieve a certain goal". Avoidance means "if I don't do something, something can't be achieved". For example, it is also a job. The motivation for approaching is "creating the value of life", while the motivation for avoidance is "if I don't work, I can't support myself". The former can promote personal growth, while the latter focuses more on finding a sense of security. Therefore, before giving up, we must first think clearly, "Why did I do this in the first place?" "What kind of motivation do I have?" When you figure it out, you can naturally focus on the goal you really want.
After carefully considering the above two questions before giving up, you should look for the right time to give up. If you can't find the time to give up, you will miss many opportunities. But you won't give up blindly. Before giving up, you need to fully understand yourself, think about what you can do, and understand what your motivation and goal plan are. Those who dare to give up are good at planning their own lives. What should I do if I have decided to give up?
1. Release stress and relax.
Giving up can easily lead to depression and other negative emotions. Although many people have smiles on their faces, they are very unhappy. This state of repressed emotions can not only help themselves, but also aggravate the spread of negative emotions. The correct way is: don't suppress your emotions. What we need is to perceive this true emotion and then adjust our inner feelings, instead of suppressing, identifying → expressing → making decisions with emotions, and so on. In fact, it is also called keeping mindfulness, facing up to your emotions and taking care of your emotions, rather than hiding and suppressing them. For example, after resigning, although there will be doubts about "I am unemployed, I don't know what will happen in the future". But at the same time, I told myself: "This is only temporary, because I am working hard for the future." Release your emotions and stare at them, and the negative emotions will gradually disappear.
You can try:
* Imagine a relaxed and happy time.
* consciously arrange a period of time and only think about the problems that worry you, "thinking delay"
* Speak out your concerns.
* Try meditation
draw up a plan
Giving up doesn't mean doing nothing, but making plans and re-planning your life after choosing goals that are more suitable for you. The best way to get rid of one idea is to concentrate on another. For example, if you keep thinking "Don't eat junk food", you probably still can't refuse junk food. On the other hand, if you think, "What will be healthier to eat?" The idea of junk food naturally dissipated.
Take out paper and pen, write down a new plan, replace the old goal with a new one, and find something truly meaningful, worth pursuing and dedicated, which can effectively reduce the entanglement. At the same time, it can also help you focus on the present and take action to achieve new goals. Studies have shown that writing goals is excellent, and careful planning and reflection on personal goals will really help people who are struggling to improve their grades. We can list goals in different categories, such as life goals, work goals, interpersonal goals, learning goals and so on. Clearly express the goal, make a plan to achieve the goal, predict the possible changes in the future, and evaluate the goal from multiple angles. The goals we set for ourselves reflect "who we are" and "what kind of person we want to be". Re-set goals, learn lessons from giving up, and make us more mature psychologically and behaviorally, so as to rebuild ourselves.
take action
Some people say that what the world never lacks is not a perfect plan, but the motivation to do it and arrange enough time for new goals. It may be a little difficult at first, but you can urge, spur and encourage yourself through relatives and friends, and even encourage you with some external stimuli, which is a good choice for a fresh start. If you don't do it blindly, you never know how the follow-up things will develop. When the so-called plan is perfect, it may not be applicable to the current environment, but in fact, a small external condition can have an immeasurable impact on the follow-up. So no matter how hard we try and how to make a perfect plan, we can't see the whole development process clearly. Only by acting quickly can we promote the development of things and finally reach our desired destination. As Lu Sihao said in "May someone accompany you from one place to another", a plan without action is worse than no plan, and an idea without action equals no idea. After all, planning is only the premise of implementation, and action is the essence of implementation. If the plan cannot be practiced and summarized through action, any perfect plan can only be a fairy tale that can never be realized.
Thinking determines your actions, and actions determine your results. When your actions keep up with your thinking, your energy can maximize what you want.
Life will never be a dark road, and the lack of the ability to give up will make us fall into a frustrating endless cycle. If it doesn't suit us or persists knowing that there is no hope, it will not only be meaningless, but also waste energy and even cause physical and mental harm. So don't fall into the trap of persistence, you need to carefully analyze whether you really need to persist. There is too much uncertainty and temptation in the future. Don't blindly persist for fear of losing, and don't overconfident and overestimate your ability to choose distant goals, correctly recognize your inner direction, follow your heart, don't surrender to foreign things, choose the right time and give up decisively. By actively adjusting our mood, setting appropriate goals, making detailed and reasonable plans, and then acting quickly, we will know what we really want and what can make us happy, so as to have a new understanding of life and start a new life course. In order to show the meaning of life vividly, we all need to master the art of giving up. Knowing when to persist and when to give up is a crucial skill.
People who give up are not necessarily losers, and persistence is not necessarily victory.
As Goethe said:
The whole mystery of life lies in giving up survival in order to survive.