7 Helpful Reminders When You Really Want To Quit

5 min readSep 4, 2018

It is often said that the only time we fail at something is when we quit. While there are times when quitting our goals can be the best choice for us, it is not something we want as a habit.

When we quit, we are shutting off any possibility of getting the results we want. That can have a significant effect on how we respond when we are faced with new challenges in the future.

There have been many times when I have wanted to quit creating new content for my website. Every week, I battle with myself to come up with new topics to write about and it is sometimes quite stressful especially since I made a commitment to create new content every week.

However, every time I keep coming back to several helpful reminders, which reconnects me to why I should continue to stay with it and create new content.

Here are five things to come back to during times when you feel like giving up so that you can refocus, recommit and resume taking the actions necessary to move closer to what you want.

1. A breakthrough may just be around the corner. Quite often, the thing we really want is just a few steps away — all we have to do is to maintain our faith that things will work out. In the book, Think and Grow Rich, there is a story of a man who bought land hoping to find gold. He bought all the necessary equipment to find gold but after months of effort, he did not find any gold.

Frustrated, he sold his land and equipment. The new owner continued digging for gold only to find large amounts of gold just three feet away from where the previous owner had quit. That coined the phrase, “Three Feet from Gold.” The moral of the story is we should never quit too soon because our breakthrough may just be a few steps away.

2. You’ve gotten through tough situations before and you will get through them again. We’ve all faced difficult situations in our lives and if you’re reading this, you’ve survived them all. With every difficult situation we survive, we develop mental strength, resiliency and a stronger capacity to handle tougher situations.

3. There is an opportunity in every experience. No matter what we experience, we can always find an opportunity or a benefit. One of the laws of the universe is the polarity, also known as the law of opposites.

This law states that if we deem an experience to be bad or negative, then there also has to be something good or positive about it. We cannot have one without the other. In other words, we cannot have a bad experience without there being something good about it too. Our job is to look for what is good in every situation.

4. The struggle will make the reward even more enjoyable. I know I get a lot more enjoyment out of things I’ve really earned. Sure, it’s nice to achieve things easily but we can also very quickly move onto the next thing we want to achieve.

But when we’ve put in the effort, blood, sweat and tears into something, and when we do achieve it, there is a much greater sense of accomplishment and a higher degree of personal fulfilment. We must learn to welcome the struggle and see it as a necessary part of the journey to success.

5. Focus on the next thing you can do. It is so easy to get caught up with things we cannot change or control. When we do that, we start focusing on things that are not going well, which takes us away from focusing on things we can control and do. Sometimes, all it takes is a new perspective or a new action to give us the momentum we need to achieve our goals faster.

6. When you’re failing, it means you are learning and growing. Failing at something simply means we’ve discovered a way that will not get us closer to the result we want. That “failure” can be instrumental in helping us achieve our next big breakthrough in life. There are lessons in every experience and it is our responsibility to extract those lessons and learn from them.

7. Trust that your current experience is exactly what you need right now. We tend to have certain experiences in life when we are “ready” to receive them. While going through a difficult situation may be painful in the moment, it is really what we need as part of our growth and evolution. We just have to trust that things will work out, as they always do.

Every person has experienced failure in life. It is important that we should never consider ourselves as failures — we’ve simply failed at certain things. If we come back to these reminders over and over again during times of struggle, soon enough our mindset around failure will change, and we will be less likely to quit at any sign of a challenge.

Action Step: At the sign of your next challenge or obstacle, come back to these reminders and refocus on the things you can do to continue moving forward toward what you want.

Question: Which reminder did you find most useful for the situation you’re currently in?

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