Balancing persistence vs pivoting – is grit a virtue or wasteful?
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Being persistent, sticking to a plan and showing up to work every day is generally valued highly across all cultures as virtuous behavior. It is obvious that anything of value and worth achieving is also not easy, but requires significant and recurring effort. Learning a new language, winning a sports competition or building a successful business are all typical scenarios where grit plays a central role above everything else. However, sometimes the virtue of tenacity can result in just a waste of energy.<br>The question is then: how does one recognize that true progress is being blocked by stubbornness and a pivot would be the correct decision, as opposed to being close to breakthrough where doing more of the same would actually be the right choice?<br>What is persistence actually?<br>To think clearly about this topic, one must first grasp the concept of “grit” and what it looks like in practice. Research by psychologist Angela Duckworth on “grit” shows that sustained effort in the face of setbacks separates high achievers from those who quit too soon. Entrepreneurs who iterated through dozens of failed prototypes or writers who revised manuscripts for years understand this truth. Persistence builds resilience, deep expertise, and the kind of compounding results that shortcuts cannot deliver. It also protects against the distraction of shiny new ideas that pull focus from what actually works.<br>Persistence is about:<br>Believing in an outcome and working towards it despite people around you not sharing the belief, and despite your own work and experiments not being successful.<br>Continuing to hold the belief and sticking to the decision despite other ideas, solutions and competing alternatives surfacing.<br>The more time passes, the firmer the conviction becomes. Time, money, and emotional energy invested in a failing direction create psychological pressure to continue (sunk-cost fallacy ).<br>Simply following through on a plan or upholding a contract is not true persistence. Grit is a personal trait one can cultivate to actually become more energized to do something precisely because it turns out to be harder than expected.<br>Pivoting: a calculated choice<br>The opposite of being persistent is giving up. Pivoting is not about giving up, but about redirecting the energy and momentum towards a new goal. Pivoting requires coming to the realization that you were wrong, and going through the painful process of discovering a new truth.<br>Ideas tend to be abundant, and doing something new isn’t hard as such. The hard part is to abandon a previously held belief and adopt a new one with equal conviction. To have that conviction you need to have data and metrics. This is also the key to how to decide between persisting vs pivoting at any moment in time.<br>Key metrics of success<br>Any decision is only as good as the information available at the time it was made. To be set up for success one needs to start by deciding on what the actual goal is, what one values and how progress is measured.<br>Key metrics are usually easiest to discover by working backwards from the goal. If you want to build an electric car, you might decide that the goal is to have a car that costs 30,000 euros and can drive 300 km on one charge. From that goal you can break down what the cost structure should be, what volume of production is needed to break even, what raw materials are needed and what the battery chemistry needs to achieve to meet the goal. That can further be broken down into a rate of progress. Suppose the plan requires battery energy density to reach 150 Wh/kg to be viable. If the state of the art starts at 100 Wh/kg and funding lasts a maximum of five years, the team needs at least an 8% improvement every year (1.08^5 × 100 Wh/kg ≈ 150 Wh/kg). This can then be used as a guideline. Sometimes progress is not steady, but happens in jumps. Even in those cases there should be a trajectory to benchmark the jumps against.<br>In an online business, the key metric could, for example, be one of these:<br>7- or 30-day retention rate: Do new users who try the service actually like it?<br>Weekly or monthly active users: Is usage trending up?<br>Feature adoption rate: In an existing service, how many users are using the new feature?<br>Product-Market Fit Score (from Sean Ellis test): Percentage of users who say they would be “very disappointed” if the product disappeared. Above 40% is a strong early indicator. A number below that (after multiple iterations) is a good data point to pivot.<br>Revenue run rate or burn rate : The most generic metric everything eventually boils down to. Healthy markets reward good products.<br>Weekly metrics are better than monthly, as they make the feedback loop faster and allow you to get validation quickly and do minor course corrections along the way. A complete pivot should,...