Giving up is good for you, by Mikel Liebe

~Inspired by “Losing is Good for You” by Ashley Merryman 

Last year during my freshman year of high school, I got in over my head due to getting a bit too confident. We were tasked with making a project about our personal health, routine, and interests. I wanted to put in some extra work and make a video. It ended up taking me a long time, and as the deadline approached I realized I might have made the wrong choice. I was so focused on making some flashy video with fancy edits and effects to show superiority, as I didn’t want to make some boring powerpoint. It was taking me so much time due to the scope of the project. I was too far into it to just give up and scrap it. A week had passed by, and I still hadn’t finished it. I finally bit the bullet and scrapped it, making a power point in its place. I didn’t feel as satisfied, since I spent less time on it. But I felt so much more relieved that I finally got it turned in. If I had done the video I would have felt a lot better about what I had made, but It would’ve been far to late to mean anything. If I had taken any longer, my teacher might have just failed me no matter what. I had to give up and take the easy road. I feel like people don’t take the risk of giving up on something, because their ego gets in the way of their judgement. Getting your pride and ego in the way just makes you some oversensitive punk who will only allow the best of the best out of themselves, and NEVER takes no for an answer. Giving up may be the healthiest option if things drive too far off course to recover safely. When the deadline gets closer and closer, some may do nothing about it or do too much. Both of those options can make everything you were working on fall apart. A deadline creates too much stress, and not enough people choose the easy way out since they’d rather do the absolute best they can.   

When brain storming for ideas, writer  Tim Herra says  in his article “Why Giving Up Is Sometimes The Best Way To Solve A Problem”: “The real problem, we finally realized, wasn’t the one we were trying to solve. It was that we were so focused on finding a solution that we never stopped to question whether we should even be doing the thing causing us problems in the first place.” He warns that most people fail at being fully self-aware when needed, which can cause tunnel vision to the real solution. When I was making my video project, I failed to see how long it was taking me and failed to accept how easy just making the powerpoint would be. That blindness to the answer that is right in front of you can cause a lot of frustration and stress, as we never want to take the easy way out.

But why do people feel this way? “It definitely is kind of an issue of ego or self-esteem because we believe that we want to be a success, and in our eyes, quitting is a type of failure,” says Dr. Kristin Neff, an associate professor at the University of Texas. This can cause us to live an unhealthy lifestyle, and not be able to realize when things are going wrong. 

In my eyes, in order to let people realize that sometimes failure is the only way out of something, we need to put them in a situation where they have to give up. All of these The Inspiration Nation are constantly talking out of their asses saying they you should never give up keep looking forward, but they need to plug their own holes and let people think for themselves like the fully conscious beings we are. 

Now, let’s start fighting for the normalization of failure.