There’s a point in almost every worthwhile pursuit when motivation stops carrying you. The excitement wears off after a launch and results take longer than expected. Customers say no more often than you expected, and now your best employees are leaving.
That’s usually when success becomes less about talent, intelligence, or expertise and more about what you do next. Steve Jobs understood this unusually well.
In a 1995 interview, he was asked about the factors that determine entrepreneurial success. He said:
I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.
Jobs went on to explain that building something meaningful inevitably brings rough moments when most people consider giving up. Without enough passion for the problem you’re trying to solve, he argued, you probably won’t stick with it.
Over 30 years later, that lesson deserves another look.
What Jobs meant by perseverance
There’s a version of perseverance that leaders should avoid. It sounds like, We’ve already invested too much to stop now. Or, We just need to keep grinding and work harder. That’s not Jobs’s version of the word.
Sometimes quitting is exactly what a smart leader should do. Markets change, and some products or strategies outlive their usefulness.
The better interpretation of Jobs’s advice is this: Be stubborn about the problem you want to solve, but flexible about how you solve it.
Jobs connected perseverance directly to passion. Research backs up Jobs’s intuition. In a study published in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, researchers examined 129 entrepreneurs and found that entrepreneurial passion helped explain why people who believed in their ability to succeed kept taking action. In particular, passion for inventing and founding was associated with greater persistence.
When you care intensely about the problem you’re solving or the thing you’re building, you have a reason to keep going when the work gets painful.
More recent research reinforces the point. A 2023 systematic review of the entrepreneurial persistence literature described persistence as continuing effortful action despite adversity, obstacles, and setbacks. The researchers concluded that persistence plays an important role in both venture success and entrepreneurs’ personal growth.
In other words, perseverance isn’t simply refusing to quit. It’s continuing to move toward something that still matters when circumstances give you plenty of reasons to stop. That is a much healthier model of perseverance than simply working absurdly longer, as prescribed by hustle culture.
Make perseverance a leadership practice
When something important isn’t working, resist the instinct to immediately push harder. First, confront reality. What are the numbers, customers, or employees actually telling you? Then reconnect to the purpose behind the work. What problem are you still committed to solving? Finally, change the method if necessary.
You can abandon a strategy without abandoning the mission. And you can change direction without becoming someone who “gave up.” That may be the form of perseverance leaders need most today.
Think about one important goal you’re struggling with right now. Don’t ask, “Should I quit?” Maybe consider asking something like, “What am I committed to preserving, and what am I willing to change to get there?”
—Marcel Schwantes
This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister website, Inc.com.
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