ergophobe - 4:15 pm on Mar 18, 2008 (gmt 0)

>> Just remember that you can only fail when you give up

I'm 5'7" tall, going on 45 and want to play in the NBA. So are you saying that I can make it as long as I don't give up?

I know you're trying to be motivating and that's nice and all, and I'm sorry to make light of your comment, but I find this piece of advice, glibly handed out so often on WebmasterWorld, to be slightly dangerous. Sometimes you need to recognize that sunk costs are not retrievable, that beating your head against the wall one more time is not going to get rid of your headache, and move on.

See Seth Godin, The Dip, for a recent take on this. For me, as a mountaineer, I learned very young that sometimes the most intelligent thing you can do is give up. We have a saying: "Making it to the summit is optional. Making it back to basecamp is not." Think about it. The people who die in the Himalaya, in many cases, die because they don't recognize when to give up. In my opinion, dieing is failure. Many business go into bankruptcy and ruin the lives of their owners for similar reasons.

So often people fail just short of success because they give up. So often, though, people fail because, long past the point of possible success, they refuse to give up. Telling the difference between the one and the other is one of the more difficult things in life.

I understand and appreciate the generous spirit in which you (and many others) make that comment and don't want to sound all negative (I'm fundamentally an optimist I would say), but people need to ask themselves whether or not "keeping going" is always the good strategy because "winners never quit".