Being persistent, sticking to a plan and showing up to work every day is generally valued highly across all cultures as virtuous behavior. It is obvious that anything of value and worth achieving is also not easy, but requires significant and recurring effort. Learning a new language, winning a sports competition or building a successful business are all typical scenarios where grit plays a central role above everything else. However, sometimes the virtue of tenacity can result in just a waste of energy.

The question is then: how does one recognize that true progress is being blocked by stubbornness and a pivot would be the correct decision, as opposed to being close to breakthrough where doing more of the same would actually be the right choice?

What is persistence actually?

To think clearly about this topic, one must first grasp the concept of “grit” and what it looks like in practice. Research by psychologist Angela Duckworth on “grit” shows that sustained effort in the face of setbacks separates high achievers from those who quit too soon. Entrepreneurs who iterated through dozens of failed prototypes or writers who revised manuscripts for years understand this truth. Persistence builds resilience, deep expertise, and the kind of compounding results that shortcuts cannot deliver. It also protects against the distraction of shiny new ideas that pull focus from what actually works.

Persistence is about:

1. Believing in an outcome and working towards it despite people around you not sharing the belief, and despite your own work and experiments not being successful.
2. Continuing to hold the belief and sticking to the decision despite other ideas, solutions and competing alternatives surfacing.
3. The more time passes, the firmer the conviction becomes. Time, money, and emotional energy invested in a failing direction create psychological pressure to continue (sunk-cost fallacy).

Simply following through on a plan or upholding a contract is not true persistence. Grit is a personal trait one can cultivate to actually become more energized to do something precisely because it turns out to be harder than expected.

Pivoting: a calculated choice

The opposite of being persistent is giving up. Pivoting is not about giving up, but about redirecting the energy and momentum towards a new goal. Pivoting requires coming to the realization that you were wrong, and going through the painful process of discovering a new truth.

Ideas tend to be abundant, and doing something new isn’t hard as such. The hard part is to abandon a previously held belief and adopt a new one with equal conviction. To have that conviction you need to have data and metrics. This is also the key to how to decide between persisting vs pivoting at any moment in time.

Key metrics of success

Any decision is only as good as the information available at the time it was made. To be set up for success one needs to start by deciding on what the actual goal is, what one values and how progress is measured.

Key metrics are usually easiest to discover by working backwards from the goal. If you want to build an electric car, you might decide that the goal is to have a car that costs 30,000 euros and can drive 300 km on one charge. From that goal you can break down what the cost structure should be, what volume of production is needed to break even, what raw materials are needed and what the battery chemistry needs to achieve to meet the goal. That can further be broken down into a rate of progress. Suppose the plan requires battery energy density to reach 150 Wh/kg to be viable. If the state of the art starts at 100 Wh/kg and funding lasts a maximum of five years, the team needs at least an 8% improvement every year (1.08^5 × 100 Wh/kg ≈ 150 Wh/kg). This can then be used as a guideline. Sometimes progress is not steady, but happens in jumps. Even in those cases there should be a trajectory to benchmark the jumps against.

In an online business, the key metric could, for example, be one of these:

• 7- or 30-day retention rate: Do new users who try the service actually like it?
• Weekly or monthly active users: Is usage trending up?
• Feature adoption rate: In an existing service, how many users are using the new feature?
• Product-Market Fit Score (from Sean Ellis test): Percentage of users who say they would be “very disappointed” if the product disappeared. Above 40% is a strong early indicator. A number below that (after multiple iterations) is a good data point to pivot.
• Revenue run rate or burn rate: The most generic metric everything eventually boils down to. Healthy markets reward good products.

Weekly metrics are better than monthly, as they make the feedback loop faster and allow you to get validation quickly and do minor course corrections along the way. A complete pivot should, however, be based on long-term data, driven by the key metric and supported by additional data points.

Metrics are also needed because they can’t be bribed or convinced to be anything other than what they are. Listening to other people is good, but just relying on the opinion of others is extremely dangerous because people are biased—either for you or against you—depending on whether they see you as a trusted leader or an outcast.

Key metrics are of course domain-specific and everyone needs to come up with their own. However, you must have some key metric. You can’t have the excuse that what you are doing can’t be measured. If you are part of a larger organization and you need to advocate for a difficult decision—for example, to “kill your darlings” when facing a pivot—you need to have the metrics to back up your views, and those metrics need to have been established way before as something the organization values, and not cherry-picked just for this one decision.

It does not matter if you are on a personal improvement journey, running a political campaign, inventing a new product, or growing a business – you need to have some metric you can check at any given time to see if things are improving fast enough to predict success. Metrics can and should also be used in daily work to validate that you are on the correct path, and to optimize execution.

Famous examples of persistence and pivoting that led to breakthroughs

In all of the cases below it is of course in hindsight easy to say they made the right decision. However, take a minute to try to imagine yourself in their shoes at the time of the decision. What metrics might they have had available to support their decision? What would you have wanted to measure or find out if you were in the same situation?

• Frustrated that his vacuum lost suction, James Dyson spent five years and built thousands of failed prototypes in a backyard shed. He remortgaged his home, lived on savings, and faced rejection from every major manufacturer who wanted to protect their bag-replacement business. The 5,127th prototype based on an idea from a sawmill with a cyclone finally worked. Launched in 1993, the Dyson DC01 became Britain’s best-selling vacuum within two years.
• As a single mother on welfare in the mid-1990s, J.K. Rowling finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone while battling depression and poverty. She hand-typed copies and mailed them to publishers. Twelve rejected it outright, with comments like “children’s books about magic don’t sell.” She nearly quit multiple times but kept revising and submitting. Bloomsbury finally accepted it after the CEO’s eight-year-old daughter read the first chapter and demanded the rest. The series has since sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide.
• Founded in 1997 as a mail-order DVD rental service, Netflix added unlimited subscriptions in 1999 to compete with Blockbuster. By 2007, broadband growth and declining DVD sales signaled a shift. CEO Reed Hastings pivoted aggressively toward streaming, investing in bandwidth deals and original content while de-emphasizing physical media. The move faced skepticism, but eventually changed the whole culture of how entertainment is consumed.
• YouTube launched in 2005 as a video-dating site. Founders offered money to women who uploaded dating videos, but almost no one did. Meanwhile, users uploaded random clips. The team recognized the mismatch and pivoted within months to a general-purpose video-sharing platform with easy uploading. Google bought it just 18 months later.
• Instagram began in 2010 as Burbn, a location-based check-in app that let users post plans, earn points, and share photos. Co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger quickly noticed users ignored most features and mainly used it for photo-sharing. They made the tough call: scrap everything else. Within weeks, they rebuilt the app around clean, simple photography with filters. The pivot launched as Instagram in October 2010. It gained 1 million users in two months and was acquired by Facebook just 18 months later.

Insanity or conviction?

English has several proverbs that warn against excessive persistence, such as “banging your head against the wall”. Insanity is commonly defined as “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

In Finland, the national identity is practically built on the concept of “sisu”. It means much more than just “grit”. The word is derived from the word for “inside” or “guts” and represents an unexplained, almost superhuman force that makes one stoically take action despite seemingly impossible odds and somehow succeed anyway. It became a defining national mythos during the Winter War (1939–1940), where a force 10 times larger than the Finnish army tried to invade the country but was stopped and Finland just barely managed to keep its independence. The word “sisu” transitioned from a character trait to a pillar of national survival.

I think Finns survived because the more you believe in persistence, the more likely you are to persist. I view persistence as a religion that requires faith, while pivoting is a science where you derive the truth from the numbers.

When in doubt, I would always choose persistence over pivoting. Perhaps it is because of my genetic tendency towards having “sisu”, but I would also rather keep on going a bit more and try one more time before giving up and pivoting in order to get more data, so that when I pivot, I know it is absolutely the right thing to do at that point.

Depending on the situation, the costs of postponing the pivot vary. Of course, if the main metric is the burn rate and a company is running out of money, a pivot must be done early enough that the remaining runway is enough to execute the pivot, and then some more.

In some situations a business idea might simply be ahead of its time. If that is the conviction and the key metrics support it, the best way to navigate the situation is to cut down on costs and wait for competitors to appear, help build general awareness, and then ramp up again to ride the wave. Remember that success does not come from grit alone – there is always an element of timing and luck as well. But if you are not persistent and stop showing up every day, you won’t be able to seize the opportunities if and when they arise.

Failure is the likely outcome – you have to avoid it at any cost

One must also realize that most attempts end in failure. Failure is the baseline, and success is the exception. To reach a breakthrough, one must be stubbornly persistent. In particular, if you are a leader, you need to be so high in conviction that it almost becomes an aura that radiates to those around you.

Postponing the decision to pivot allows you to get a bit more data for the decision, so that once you pivot, you have full belief in the new direction. Once you pivot, there is no looking back, otherwise you will undermine morale and most certainly fail with the new thing as people will execute it with hesitation.

Failure is statistically always the more likely outcome. Most things end in failure and we never hear about them. If someone on your team does not believe in what you are doing, it is very easy for them to “prove” that something is a failure by spreading negativity, putting in less effort (perhaps unconsciously due to lack of conviction) and thus actually contributing to a self-fulfilling failure.

In most areas of life, ideas are cheap and the only thing that matters is execution. To be good at executing, you need to be good at making decisions. When drafting plans it is good to have alternatives and a lot of consideration. However, when execution starts, there is no room for doubt, otherwise the chances of success decrease.

Therefore, the best way of balancing persistence vs pivoting is to

1. plan well ahead,
2. establish the key metrics,
3. have thresholds established for what would trigger a pivot, and
4. do everything you can to move the metrics in the direction you want them to go.

Finally, if you decide to pivot, you must do so only with very high conviction, as you can’t undo a pivot, and you should not be doing multiple pivots in a row either. If you are fully convinced yourself about the pivot, you will also be able to convince others about it, and carry the momentum.