I’ve heard people praising persistence in the face of difficulty and failure in so many places, from business lectures to spiritual advice, it’s making me sick, because my experience is quite different. In my experience, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging. If something you have been doing has fucked you up, maybe, just maybe, doing more of it and harder isn’t the brightest idea. Instead, how about stopping to think and change your approach, maybe even revise your goals? Because if things are not working, you have several possibilities, and you can present them in simplified form as a 2×2 matrix, where the possibilities are that you are doing either a right thing or a wrong thing, and you are doing too much or not enough. So, the troublesome possibilities are that you’re either doing too much of a wrong thing, or not enough of a good thing. At the point of failure, assuming that you are doing the right thing, and only failing because you’re not doing enough of it is simply stupid.

Let’s put it this way. Life is a process of learning, from the point where you’re pissing into diapers to the point where you are reading articles such as this one. You had to go through certain steps in order to get where you are now. You didn’t get here by doing more of the things you did when you were 5. So, assuming that the first thing you will try will also be the last thing you will ever need is to assume you will die failing there. If not, you’ll outgrow it. You will either try it and see it’s not working, in which case you’ll find something more useful for attaining your goals, or you will try it, succeed and progress to the next level, of both understanding and methodology, and, quite possibly, of goals, because if your goals are still the same you had as when you were 5, you’re retarded. Your goals need to change with your growth in understanding.

The next issue is not that of right or wrong, but of approaching the problem adequately. If you don’t have a hammer at hand, it’s probably ok to hammer a nail or two with pilers, but if you didn’t get up to find a hammer after the second nail, you’re a lazy fuck. You need to change your approach as you do things; you need to adapt, learn, think. If your problem is something simple, such as unloading a truck full of cement bags, it is completely solvable by linearly scaling work. The more you work, the more gets done, and the more bodies you throw at the problem, it gets done faster. However, such problems are usually solved so quickly you can’t really call them “problems”. The stuff where you are likely to get stuck or fail is usually the stuff that requires a change in approach, basically you need to do things with your brain turned on and with your eyes open, observe what’s going on and focus on accomplishing your goals, and not necessarily on keeping your methods the same.

In spirituality, this is the most frequent reason for failure, and reason why failure is the norm and success is the exception. The way it works is that religions and cults assume their way is the right way, that more of it gives better results and all kinds of failure are due to not doing it enough or in the right way. Essentially, their basic assumption is that there’s nothing wrong with them.

Really?

Islam, for instance, thinks that solution to all problems is more islam. It doesn’t understand that the problem of islamic countries is that they are islamic. Ataturk understood that and worked on removing Islam from the position of Turkey’s solution-seeking paradigm. The result was that Turkey became the most advanced “islamic” country, but that’s a misnomer because it became advanced exactly because of not being islamic. Of course, there are always those who don’t understand that, and who think that the way to solve the remaining problems would be to introduce more islam, because that would make it better; of course it would, since there’s nothing wrong with it. Right. Also, in order to survive in the modern world, religions adapted by stating that you can take just the spiritual and ethical part of them, and for the rest you can have science and modern technology. However, if a religion fails at science and technology, if its approach is a dead-end there, what reason is there for you to think that its approach to God and ethics is any different? Most likely, its’s the same kind of failure, only more difficult to demonstrate because people were taught to accept bad assumptions as axioms.

Every stupid cult in the world thinks like that, and that’s why they are all dead ends. They are not solutions, they are problems. If you start from the premise that you already have all the important answers, you’re deluded. Spirituality is a process of transformation, and if you stick to all the ideas you initially brought with you, there’s no transformation, and doing more of that same shit will just waste more time.

No, the way to get somewhere is to assume you are on the starting point and you don’t have all the answers. When you get stuck somewhere, you can’t just assume that you need persistence. What you need is to stop and think, to see if you’re doing something wrong and that’s causing the difficulties, or you are in fact doing everything right and it’s just hard.

Persistence, of course, is essential when you need to do something that is difficult, takes a lot of time and effort, and you can’t just stop every now and then and check if 2+2 is still 4. Sometimes you indeed do have to persist and just grind the problem away. However, to assume that all problems are like that, that’s going to put you in a world of fail.