Know when you are beaten

There is a lot of reasons why a business can fail when starting out:

You can run out of time, money, patience. You can be talking to the wrong audience. Perhaps, you are ahead of your time. Your marketing/delivery can be off.

That doesn’t mean it wasn’t worth the journey. Because when we decide we are going to create something, we are deciding to solve a problem for someone.

That’s noble in itself. But you can’t stay at something forever. Our time here is finite.

Stephen King calls it, “killing your darlings.” It’s a good way to look at it. As hard as it maybe, there comes a time when you must learn to walk away. Every good scientist makes a hypothesis and knows when the experiment is over.

It’s not fair. You have sunk so much time into this project. But much like the fourth year law student, who realizes they hate practicing law–it’s a sunk cost.

The sooner we can accept this, the sooner we can get back to work. Solving the next problem. We need you.