An Ode To Giving Up

Pop quiz: 

What’s Viagra?

What are Post-it notes?

What is Slack?

If you answered “a medically induced erection, little slips of paper you can stick onto surfaces, and a team communications platform” (or anything along those lines), sorry bud, you bombed the quiz. 

Viagra is actually a failed heart medication. 

Post-it notes are failed industrial adhesives.

And Slack is a failed video game.

Viagra was supposed to treat angina, chest pain caused by reduced blood flow to the heart. Turns out it was much better at increasing blood flow somewhere else… Pfizer gave up on the original mission, changed course, and accidentally incidentally created one of the most successful pharmaceuticals in history.

Dr. Spencer Silver was working on a super-strong glue for aerospace tech. He created a glue that could hold a piece of paper onto a wall – barely. It wasn’t particularly suitable for an airplane… But on a whiteboard? Perfect.

Design studio Tiny Speck was developing a video game called Glitch. The game was not a commercial success and eventually was shut down. But along the development journey, the team had developed an awesome internal tool to coordinate work. That tool became Slack. 

Giving up gets a bad rap. We treat it like a character flaw. A lack of grit. A failure of nerve.

But sometimes giving up is exactly what progress looks like.

None of these breakthroughs happened because someone stubbornly clung to Plan A. They happened because someone was willing to let Plan A die.

That’s the paradox: failure wasn’t the obstacle. Failure was the doorway.

We love stories about persistence, and for good reason. Persistence matters. But so does the ability to recognize when you’ve reached the end of one road and the beginning of another.