Mr. Me

A little glimpse of me.

I give up.

· by Mr. Me · General

Sometimes, the solution to a difficult problem is to throw your hands up in the air and walk away.

I know that what I'm saying seems to go against everything about success that you've ever heard.

  • Never give in! Never give in! Never, never, never! ~Winston Churchill
  • Fall seven times, stand up eight. ~Japanese Proverb
  • He conquers who endures. ~Persius
  • When you come to the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on. ~Franklin D. Roosevelt

I'm not saying that one should ALWAYS be a quitter, but once in a while, giving up is the right thing to do.

This morning, for example, I was working on a problem at work. There were two ways of doing what I needed to do, and both should have been working identically. SHOULD HAVE BEEN. When I tried it one way, it worked perfectly. When I tried it the other way (the way that I was TRYING to get to work right), it would fail for no apparent reason.

As of this morning, I had exhausted every possible way of figuring out the problem. I had tried everything I could think of, everything everyone on my team could think of, and everything everyone on a couple of other teams could think of. We're talking serious dead end here.

So I gave up.

I conceded defeat and explained the less-than-ideal method to the person I was working with and walked him through the process I had created. The process that worked perfectly for me FAILED for him. But this was good news! Because of the failure he was seeing, the reason for the failure I was having on the "preferred" method became crystal clear to me, and an hour later, everything was working exactly as I had hoped it would.

Sometimes, you just have to give up. This time, surrender led to a solution that would have taken a lot longer if I had continued to figure out what was wrong.