How not to give up on starting a business

No one gives up on a good day. The urge to drop everything shows up in the month when the customer pays late, the partner disappears, the bill comes due and the body is tired. Not giving up, at that point, isn't a matter of infinite willpower. It's having the structure to get through the bad month without making permanent decisions with a tired mind.

And one distinction matters: persisting is keeping the purpose and changing the method when the data says so. Being stubborn is keeping the method against the data.

The practical path

1. Go back to the why. Write in one sentence why you started and whom the business exists for. Stick it where you see it every day. In bad months, the reason holds you up more than the goal does.
2. Shorten the horizon. A five-year goal paralyzes when there isn't money for the rent. Work with one-week and one-month goals, small and verifiable.
3. Write down the small wins. The first customer who came back, the first month without a loss, the process that got done. Whoever doesn't record wins only remembers defeats.
4. Don't stay alone. Entrepreneur groups, mentoring, Sebrae programs, one trusted person to talk to once a week. The Endeavor and IDB Lab survey on founders' mental health pointed to financial problems, difficulty balancing work and life, and fear of failure among the biggest sources of distress. No one has to carry that in silence.
5. Rest on purpose. Sleeping, eating, moving and taking one day a week off isn't a luxury: it's what keeps your head able to decide.
6. Change what isn't working, fast. If a part of the business hasn't sold for months, change that part. Persisting in the purpose is easier when you don't have to defend what has already shown it doesn't work.
7. Have stopping criteria. Paradoxically, knowing at what point you would stop helps you not stop too early.

If the urge to give up comes with hopelessness, weeks without sleep or thoughts that nothing makes sense, that's a health matter, not a business one. Seek help: CVV answers for free, 24 hours a day, at 188, and your city's primary health unit can refer you.

How Bairo went through it

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez's story, as he tells it, is made of falls: hard years after leaving his first job in Brazil, partners who pushed him out of the business, going broke with many people depending on him, a project in which he was left hanging by people he had helped. At some point along the road, he was broke, broken and beaten, but still with a flame of hope and faith.

He found that strength in faith and in silence, and also in an old lesson from capoeira, his first bridge to Brazil: in the circle, the ginga never stops. Whoever stops, falls.

The Method step

This is the page for step 7 of the Seventh Attempt Method: go quiet and return to the circle. Twenty minutes without screens before any big decision. Then take stock: what has each attempt already left in your hands? The next one starts with that list.

Discover the Seventh Attempt Method

Read also

• When to give up on a business?
• Entrepreneur burnout: signs and what to do
• Capoeira was the bridge