I have often written about the importance of having patience and perseverance in life, whether it relates to a business (or other projects) or even our investments.

Truth is, people often quit things before they actually have a chance to naturally evolve into success.

That said, surely there must also be a time where we just have to quit, because there just seems to be nothing but endless setbacks, without any significant successes to celebrate.

Of course, we tend to live in a world that's often long on plans and promises and short on execution and delivery.

The world of Crypto is a great example of that.

Excluding outright "planned rugpulls," the vast majority of crypto projects seem to start off with great fanfare and promise... and soon enough turn out to be pretty much nothing, or they end up struggling endlessly, leaving their supporters eternally hoping that "the next time" will get things back on track.

Sometimes I wonder whether it's simply a reality of LIFE that the ratio of success-to-failure is rather tiny.

Even stepping outside the Cryptosphere, the officially published figures suggest that something on the order of 50% new businesses fail within their first five years.

Frankly, I think that understates the reality of things, perhaps because the really small projects — like "solopreneurships" — tend to be severely underreported.

More likely, something like 80% fail within their first five years.

But getting back to disappointments and quitting, not long ago I was having a conversation with a local business owner who started a local shop about eight years ago. Just as they were getting ready to celebrate their first anniversary, there was a freak "200-year" rain storm event that flooded their premises and forced a shutdown for eight weeks, while they cleaned up and rebuilt.

They even had to take out loans to rebuild because their insurance company called the incident an Act of God" and thus not covered.

Just six months after re-opening, the city started a major project — putting all the utilities underground and narrowing the street to make it more pedestrian friendly — on the street where the store was located, severly restricting access to the store's front entrance.

Scheduled to last six months, that project actually took 11 months to complete.

But my acquaintance bravely hung in there, and managed to make it through the rubble and still have a business by a return to normalcy in July 2019.

Eight months later... came COVID and lockdowns and pretty much the closure of all walk-in type establishments.

And that, was the end.

In a sense, this was also an illustration of how something can fail, even though the operator/entrepreneur/business doesn't actually do anything wrong."

One of the things they studiously avoid teaching in business schools is that a substantial element of the success vs. failure rate of a business or project comes down to pure luck. Of course, since you can't teach luck... best to avoid talking about it, altogether!

Disappointment seems pretty common in the Cryptosphere... but perhaps it behooves us to remember that both individual tokens and the overall market tends to make their gains in quick sharp bursts, punctuating many long slow declines or "going sideways."

It's easy to grow disappointed when you look at your investments and watch them lose 1/10 of a percent every day, and it seems just relentless, until the gains suddenly happen as a 20% rise in a week... followed by another protracted period of small declines.

Add in repeated promises of "great things happening, just around the corner," that never actually come to fruition — or are disappointely below estimates — and it becomes very tempting to just throw in the towel and give up.

Even though you might be an optimist and always able to find some tiny ray of hope in all the gloom... there may still come enough when optimism no longer is enough to carry the day.

Feel free to leave a comment — this IS "social" media, after all!

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