What Not Giving Up Really Looks Like
Leadership and business literature is rife with dictums and volumes about not giving up. The sentiment was even on a now-ancient Successories poster that said:
Go over, go under, go around, or go through. But never give up.
Here, the message is brute force, as if you’re a Navy SEAL who’s going to achieve his mission or die trying. Failure is not an option!
Nice sentiment, and probably motivational for bristling alpha types, but not altogether realistic. In fact, an acumen dressed with too much bravado leads to problems in the long run. Problems that make “not giving up” very difficult due to a variety of consequences that befalls such behavior.
Instead, perseverance is the root of not giving up, but nowhere does it connote not failing.
In real life, not giving up often means getting up after you’ve been kicked in the teeth or otherwise turned down. Not giving up means not letting a few failures define you.
Not giving up means letting a few doors slam shut and being mindful enough to listen for the one that opens.
Such as it was for a man named Brian Acton, a former Yahoo! employee, who had a fairly lousy year in 2009. He applied to both Twitter and Facebook, and got denied by both. He tweeted about both rejections openly:
Look at his tweets – dude’s got a great attitude, and it shows. He just got turned down by two of the largest web/social companies in the world – it’s clear that’s where his heart is – and concluded, “Looking forward to life’s next adventure.”
Reach, boom, on his back. Reach again, history repeats and he falls short. Ouch.
But he got back up.
Getting back up, in Acton’s case, meant venturing out on his own. Teaming with Jan Kourn, another ex-Yahoo! guy, the two created their own little app with no guaranteed future to speak of. It was cross-platform, subscription-based, and could send messages, video, images and audio, as well as some basic location information between mobile users.
The app did pretty well right off the bat. In October 2011 their app was handling one billion messages per day. That’s worldwide, across every mobile platform out there. Decent.
In April of 2012, the app was handling two billion messages per day. 100% message volume growth in six months.
In August of 2012, Acton and Kourn’s app was handling ten billion messages per day. In December 2013, the app had 400 million active users.
The app is called WhatsApp, and two days ago Facebook announced it just acquired WhatsApp $16 billion dollars.
Billion. With a “B.”
That’s what not giving up looks like. That’s how you wait for your next door to open.
What the business review of this lesson should be: If you can’t join them, take your lumps, start your own company, become invaluable to their service portfolio, and have them buy you for an astronomical price.
Whatever you do, just don’t give up.
