How to Know When to Give Up and When to Keep Going

Knowing yourself and managing expectations

True self-awareness doesn’t always serve you. Life seems to favour the deludedly arrogant, the unwarrantedly confident. When a dishonest individual follows the self-delusion axiom “fake it ‘till you make it”, he creates false positive impressions on the impressionable masses; the simpletons around him confuse his faux confidence with supposed proof of value. From personal relationships and friendships to career and business, this false demonstration of efficacy opens doors and grants him opportunities, since others see in him perceived value. This is why people get into debt to acquire an unnecessarily expensive luxury car; the vehicle changes the way most people perceive you, and therefore, how they treat you. A luxury car will impress the impressionable, the majority, and it will open doors for you in all aspects of life.

The same effect occurs with those who aren’t faking their greatness, those with so little self-awareness that they truly delude themselves they are great for some reason. It’s the same dynamic: the world will treat as kings those who already treat themselves as kings, even if they aren’t kings in reality. This royal treatment will likely pave the way for them to actually become kings.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: you act as if you were somebody, and the world will naively open doors and roll out red carpets for you, essentially making you royalty in reality.

The opposite is valid just as much: if you treat yourself with disrespect and self-doubt, then those who sense this will treat you with disrespect and doubt, because they conclude that you must have a valid reason to disrespect and doubt yourself.

So it all boils down to how you treat yourself early on in life before you accumulate proof of efficacy or inefficacy: the leap of faith you place in yourself.

• If you grant yourself the unearned benefit of the doubt, you will embark on a path which will likely lead you to success, where you will have all the support to live up to that leap of faith in yourself.

• Do the opposite (give yourself undeserved doubt and lack of confidence), and you will keep missing opportunities and failing, thus accumulating proof of failure, thus becoming worthy of that doubt you had in yourself before you came to deserve it.

Suppose you are noble enough to forgo pursuing opportunities that you believe are too good for you, options that you don’t see yourself as worthy of. In that case, those opportunities will likely be taken by people with less nobility than you, who never made that consideration.

If you renounce your chance at a relationship with someone who you think deserves better than you, then they will likely end up with someone who has no such inhibition, someone with potentially less virtue than you. The irony of life.

This article is a follow-up to ‘Knowing When to Give Up - Toxic motivators and Sisyphean cults’.

To give up or to keep holding on?

If a battle can’t be won, do not fight it. ~ Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The question is this: How do you know when hope is truly lost, and when there is still hope, but you’re just being unfair with yourself? How do you know when giving up is warranted and when you’re simply missing opportunities that are actually there for you? How do you know when you are just too biased against your abilities, too blind in your self-doubt to see what is within your reach?

Indeed, cutting your losses and quitting when you must is wise. But when do you truly know it is prudent to give up, and when is there valid hope for you to keep going in a specific endeavour? How do you know? How can you know?

It’s tricky.

The short answer is you can’t fully know what’s within your capabilities and what’s not. Just like absolute situational awareness is impossible, the best you can do is try to approximate it, and then cross your fingers and hope that your confidence in your ability to know (and in your sanity, for that matter) was well placed.

If you observe the world, witness reality as it unfolds around you, you can get a pretty good indication of what’s possible for you, assuming you are being objective with yourself, the environment you happen to find yourself in, and the circumstances of your nature. For example, you are a human being with specific needs, weaknesses, limitations, trauma, and biological programming in the form of urges and instincts. You must accept reality in your assessments of what’s possible for you at any given time.

Estimating your true potential

You could easily overestimate or underestimate your reach in different areas (professional, personal, athletic, intellectual, etc.). Your life experience accumulates data that form certain patterns, which, if interpreted fairly and without negative or positive bias, can give you an indication of what’s probable and improbable for you.

Sure, anything could potentially be possible given infinite time, but your lifetime isn’t infinite, and youth is much, much shorter than your already short life. So you could choose not only what’s theoretically achievable for you, but what’s more likely to be achieved, too. Yes, theoretically, a Middle-Eastern princess could fall in love with you if you’re a ‘street rat’ with a tendency for discovering magic lamps, but are you going to invest all your time, effort, hope, and potential on that endeavour? If so, you could be missing out on other, lesser, but more probable opportunities. So, just as in game theory, you must not only consider the value of a potential outcome; you must also consider its probability of occurring, as well as the value and probability of its opportunity cost: the opportunities you lose by pursuing other avenues.

Underestimating yourself

You have to look inwards and figure out whether the voices in your head (those granting you undue confidence or non-confidence) belong to you or actually belong to the caricatures of your abusers, which you created in your mind.

Usually, we carry with us the burdens of our abusers, the sadistic parents who deep down wanted us to fail, to cripple us, to sabotage our efforts so that we remain reliant on them, so that they can keep gratifying their narcissistic parenting needs.

And these voices of our abusers end up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: You become convinced you are useless, so you treat yourself as being useless, making all your life’s choices based on the assumption that you’ll lose, that you’ll never make it, that you won’t deserve any better. And people will see that; they will sense your self-abuse, and they will treat you accordingly. And who could blame them? When you see someone without self-confidence, you assume he knows himself better than you know him, so you treat him as lowly as he treats himself. But this is the problem: he doesn’t know himself at all. He sees himself as someone worthy of relentless and systematic abuse, the kind he had unfairly received all his life.

When people see you mistreating yourself (conducting yourself without confidence or self-esteem), they’ll believe you have a good reason for that, even when you’re being unfair with yourself. You could argue that being unfair to yourself is reason enough to make you low-value. So people won’t want to be your friends, your lovers, or your business partners. Nobody wants to be around miserable losers; negativity is infectious. Understandingly so, despite the valid cause and effect that has made you this way.

It wasn’t your fault for becoming low value, but it’s your responsibility to either live with it or try to improve as much as realistically possible.

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So, your abusers told you you were a loser when you weren’t, but because you believed them, you became one. You take their relentless abuse and naively conclude that you deserved it. Therefore, you give up on yourself, give up on higher standards for yourself, on higher expectations, higher goals, higher ideals, higher virtues.

And once you do that, once you give up on yourself, you wonder why you should bother doing anything at all. Every effort seems infinitely harder because it is pointless to you. Why would you work to succeed if you’re going to fail like you always do? And even if you succeed, it won’t be shared with anyone worthwhile, or you won’t even believe you deserved to succeed. Success for you will be nothing but a reminder of what a fraud you are.

Once you believe the voices of your abusers and you give up on yourself, you will surely fail in everything after that — giving up on yourself is failure in itself, failure that breeds more failure. And once you have all the proof of failure from real life, you identity as a failure, which then brings even more failure as you instinctively try to validate your identity.

It’s not only your abusers telling you you’re worthless; it’s the instances of failure that you accumulate after you naively believe your abusers’ lying voices. Once you internalise their lies about you, you invite failure that ends up proving them right; not because they were right when they uttered their demeaning lies against you, but because you ended up fulfilling their prophecy by erroneously taking it seriously. Since you did the time, you might as well do the crime. You then create patterns of proven inadequacy precisely because you fell for the bluff of your abusers, that you were useless.

But they were wrong at the time when they were voicing those abusive remarks and beating you like you were nothing. You weren’t low-value; they were for having the desperate need to beat down helpless children and easy targets.

Yet, you proved them right in the future by believing them, or worse, by making horrible life decisions — misaligned with your true values — in your misguided, desperate attempt to please and appease them. Trying to gain the acceptance of those who deliberately and hatefully reject us is a recipe for guaranteed failure — when scorn and indifference would have been the correct strategy.

Oh, how we strive to please the worst people in our lives, the ones who deliberately withhold their approval to manipulate us, those who don’t even deserve our second thought, let alone our greatest efforts.

Once you accumulate experiences of failure, it is perhaps impossible to stop the voices telling you to give up, to not even endeavour towards anything worthwhile. The self-defeating voices become a vicious cycle, a self-sustained feedback loop of infinite negativity.

This time, the voices aren’t the fake echoes of your abusers in your head. This time, these voices are yours, the logical conclusion from examining your proven tendencies to fail. This time, you have actual proof of failure. Before, it was only your abusers telling you you were useless, not because they had evidence of that, but because they wanted to cripple you, since they feared your potential. But now you have evidence of your uselessness, because you believed you were useless when there was no evidence you were. Tragic and. Ironic.

Overestimating yourself

Overestimating yourself tends to be useful. Deludedly confident people with an unjustifiably high sense of self-worth seem to be rewarded in this life because it works exactly like a bluff. Their confident demeanour is just a bluff. They pretend to be awesome, and when society falls for this act, it treats them as if they truly were awesome. They thus enjoy opportunities, connections, and resources that actually end up making them awesome after all.

But there is a caveat: “Faking it ‘till you make it” doesn’t always work. In some cases, you will become detestable to perceptive people who can look through either your self-delusion of greatness or your conscious pretentiousness of supposed efficacy. They will be put off by you, and you will lose them. You will then have to content yourself only with the impressionable masses who fall for your bluff, your lie of awesomeness. Granted, the masses are enough to make you “great” (according to their standards) if they fall for your faux arrogance.

But if you base your success on your bluff of confidence and self-worth (that just happened to be bought by so many gullible people), you’ll feel like a guilt-ridden fraud suffering from impostor syndrome, a weakling who succeeded by chance alone, and whose success is hanging by a thread. Your success will feel meaningless and undeserved.

In any case, if you’re reading this, I don’t think your problem is an overestimation of your abilities, but rather the opposite.

Escaping unwarranted self-doubt

We are plagued by self-doubt. Deep down, we know this to be a problem, yet we firmly believe that our self-assessment of inadequacy is realistic, a belief that makes us even less worthy. We hope we could fool ourselves and pretend to be great, but then we feel like frauds, and acting isn’t our best suit. Faking it just makes us look worse, unconvincing.

But what if you could separate your core worth and potential from the dynamics that led you to adopt low self-esteem?

What if you could take your failures and attribute them fully to those fake voices of your abusers? What if you could get rid of all the self-blame and self-punishment, but still keep the accountability? What if you could grace yourself, not with excuses, but with explanations for your failures?

This is why I write tirelessly: to separate accountability from blame, explanations from excuses, compassion from absolution, and unfree will from fatalism.

• Self-blame leads to self-deprecation because it assumes you need to be punished for your mistakes on top of having to suffer them.

• Accountability, on the other hand, is empowering because it is simply the acceptance of the fact that you had a role in your failure, which means you had the power, and therefore had — and still have — some control over your world. So, when you acknowledge accountability, you realise that you never needed proof of success. The fact that success was realistically within your grasp proves that you could have succeeded, and you still can, within realistic frameworks.

Accountability for your failures is not there to blame you, to burden you with fault. It’s only there to elevate you, to show you what was within your grasp all along.

What if you could examine the dynamics that inevitably led to your failures, and see if you can trace back the influence from the voices of your abusers? What if you could recognise the external forces that were truly beyond your control, which unduly convinced you that you were unworthy, and which then led you to treat yourself accordingly? This is not to alleviate yourself from self-accountability; only from self-blame, and from the internalising of and identification with your failures.

Simply talk to yourself, tell yourself that your failures were the inevitable consequence of being abused by people you were condemned to be attached to (usually family), and at a vulnerable age when you took them more seriously than they deserved.

What if you could separate your failures (and your successes, for that matter) from your sense of confidence and self-worth?

Respawn

What if you could clean the slate, delete the record of your life, and start fresh without undue influences? Because if your failures were influenced by your voices of your abusers, the ones you innocently believed, then those failures do not belong to you. Those failures belong to your abusers. Your failures are your abusers’ failures, those they have transferred onto you through their abuse.

Take those failures and give them back to your abusers. Attribute those failures to your abusers. Your abusers are the real failures, the real worthless losers.

Thus, you have no accumulated proof of failure. You never did.

Detach

We give weight to the opinions of people whose opinions shouldn’t matter. Actually, their opinions should only matter in reverse.

The disapproval of shitty people should be a badge of honour. If a shitty person approves of you, you should be worried. And it doesn’t matter if these people are family. Your involuntary attachment to family isn’t fair or realistic; it grants them undeserved and unearned affection from you, which they then use to abuse you. But you must see it for what it is: an inevitable hold on you that they never earned or deserved.

Key takeaway

Detach yourself from people whose opinions about you don’t matter. Decouple your sense of self-worth from a deluded sense of inadequacy from failures that were the direct consequence of your being abused by those who were supposed to be your nurturers. Don’t blame yourself for your failures and mistakes, but be accountable for them, meaning, recognise that little control you had over your life. This way, maybe you can know what is realistically possible for you and what is not.