Persistence: the fact of continuing in an opinion or course of action in spite of difficulty or opposition.
Who remembers the meme at the top from back in 2018/2019? The amount of stick i got from friends and family for not selling 'at the top' was ridiculous.
Everyone suddenly became an expert at valuation and they weren't shy to let me know it. There was also pressure from my wife to sell at $2,000. Better to get something for 'Magic Internet Money' than to get nothing at all, right?
Would be lying if I said that I wasn't tempted to let go of my bags at some points. But two things made a big difference and kept me in the game:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” - Henry Ford (attrib)
There's a famous quote that has been attributed to Henry Ford and when we talk about innovation, battle lines quickly get drawn:
Does customer input even matter or is it more about a visionary pursuing his vision against the odds?
I would argue for truly groundbreaking technology, like cars, or cryptocurrencies, in the early days it is more about the visionaries than about getting market feedback.
Of course, Henry Ford famously ignored market opinion later on to his detriment and General Motors' gain. But that was later on in the adoption cycle.
Diffusion of Innovations is a theory that tries to explain how new ideas/technologies spread. Even at the early adopters stage, which is where I believe we are in now, only around 16% have embraced the new technology.
That means that a whopping 84% of the rest of the population have not embraced the new innovation and can be a drag with their negativity.
The thing with a lot of goals is that we have no way to track our progress. It's not like a report card where we get a score that indicates how close we are to our goal. So how would you decide whether to persist or to call it quits?
For me, it is to take a hard look at the results and to compare it with my assumptions when I started the journey:
The last one is an important one. Every action has an opportunity cost and we shouldn't be blind to them. Also, factoring in the delay, would earning the same payoff be worth it?
Persistence may seem to clash with the idea of 'fail fast, fail often'. I don't think that's necessarily the case. With the 'fail fast, fail often' mantra, the goals are typically constant.
What has changed are the means of achieving those said goals.
