You Can’t Lose If You Don’t Quit

I woke up this morning thinking about something that’s been bothering my mind for a while. This was because I’ve had a lot of people reach out to me, in my DMs and other contexts, complaining about struggles with learning something new.

The question I started wondering about was: Is it because they have set deadlines, or timelines within which they want to meet their learning goals? Or perhaps because the institution they are attending has imposed these deadlines on them? Is that why they are struggling?

So, the key question here is: If you had all the time in the world to learn that particular thing with which you are struggling, would you still have a problem with it?

For instance, if you’re starting to learn programming—this being your first time learning it—and you’re really struggling to understand a particular concept you’ve just started studying, if you had all the time in the world just to study that particular thing—although I know this is not reality—would you really still struggle?

When I think deeply about this, I come to the realization that there is a high possibility that if you keep doing it for a long while, if you spend enough time on it, you are eventually going to be able to figure it out.

If that is the case, then it probably means that most of the problems we are having when it comes to struggling to understand a concept are mostly linked to the time limits that we have or the time limits that we set for ourselves.

So, I think that if we are realistic with ourselves, knowing very well what our capabilities and limitations are, and able to adjust our timelines to ensure that we give ourselves enough time to learn what we need to learn, it will go a very long way to help us succeed in this journey.

In the end, what I think is that everyone, irrespective of how knowledgeable you are or not currently in any topic, if you had enough time for it, you’re going to be able to figure it out. This is applicable to just about anything in the world: if you spend enough time with it, maybe you won’t become the best in the thing, but eventually, you’re going to figure it out in your own way.

At least in a small way or in a way that’s enough to keep you getting what you really want to get from what you’re learning.

And now, that brings me to the point I started this post on: You can’t lose if you don’t quit.

Those people who struggle and eventually are unable to make it on this journey of learning new skill sets are essentially unsuccessful because they quit. So maybe they had their own timelines—for instance, somebody wakes up and says, “Hey, I want to become a software engineer in 6 months!” and after six months they are still struggling to find their feet so they quit.

You lose the moment you quit but for as long as you have skin in the game there is still a probability of success for you. And even though you do not have all the time in the world, I want to believe that if you do not give up and if you keep doing it, you’re eventually going to win with time.