When do you finally quit?

The number of people who start a project, relationship, or journey is always more than the number of people who persist to see the end. Because quitting projects, relationships, and journeys is easier now than at any other time in human history. And because the sacrifice to persist to the end is a higher emotional, psychological, and spiritual price than many are willing to pay.

But many of the people you’ve heard of persisted in spite of a low percentage of success. Consider the stats below:

Frank Sinatra: 1,200 songs, 209 hits, 17 percent success rate. Elvis Presley: 710 songs, 40 hits, 5.6 percent success rate. Babe Ruth: 8,399 at-bats, 714 home runs, 8.5 percent success rate. Pablo Picasso: 147,800 pieces, 30 masterpieces, 0.02 percent success rate.

Quitting is the default setting for many people when the process involved in mastering the project, the journey, or the relationship gets hard; when the first attempt doesn’t work, and even when the 500th attempt isn’t what the crowd claps for and declares a “hit.”

The comic book artist and dyspeptic entrepreneur, Dave Sim, once opined in his comic book Cerebus that, “Every artist has 200 bad pages of comic book art in him. Draw those 200 pages. Get them out of your system. But remember that by the time you get to drawing that 200th page, you won’t care what other people think about those pages. And more importantly, you won’t care about what YOU think of those pages either.”

Not quitting means not caring about the opinions of others about what you’re doing. Persisting means not caring about the critiques you have of what you are doing as well.