It’s become standard advice to say “fail fast” when it comes to IT startups. The concept is don’t keep “throwing good money after bad.” When something isn’t working, it’s better to give up too early than too late. This is good advice: if you have an old car and it keeps needing repairs, it’s important to know when to stop and buy a new one. In my workplace, a very expensive, difficult to set up product was purchased and implemented. It wasn’t working, but management kept throwing more and more time and money at it. They didn’t want to lose face. Eventually, though, they were forced to give up. How much better it would have been if they had quit early!
On the other hand, the saying “persistence pays off” is illustrated with Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb. He painstakingly tried thousands of materials for making light bulb filaments before stumbling on to one that worked acceptably. He said:
The electric light has caused me the greatest amount of study and has required the most elaborate experiments…. Although I was never myself discouraged or hopeless of its success, I can not say the same for my associates….
Imagine if Thomas Edison had decided to follow the “fail fast” philosophy with the light bulb or the phonograph or his other inventions. Imagine if you decided to give up on being employed after a few interviews that didn’t get you the job you were looking for. There are many old sayings indicating the value of long term pay offs.
My advice is balance the two perspectives. Don’t let pride blind you to when things are just not going to work. On the other hand, don’t let laziness keep you trying all your options to snatch success from the clutches of failure.
802701 A.D. 