Why do some people keep going through the really hard bits of building a business, while others quietly stop?
It’s a question I sit with a lot, and the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced the usual answers aren’t quite the right ones.
Persistence is one of those words that’s gone a bit hollow. Don’t give up. Keep showing up. Trust the process. If you can hear those phrases without your eyes glazing over, you’re doing better than I am.
And I think one of the reasons we can’t quite hear them anymore is that the way persistence is usually talked about doesn’t actually match how it works in real businesses, in real creative work, over the years. It’s described as if it’s a personality trait. As if some people just have more of it than others. As if the answer to whether your business will last is whether you’ve got the grit to push through when things are hard.
But honestly, in twenty plus years of running creative businesses and now working closely with other creative business owners, I’ve never seen that pattern hold up. The people who keep going aren’t gripping their teeth and pushing harder. They’re working from a different place altogether.
Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge something. If you’ve been told for years that what determines whether your business will work is whether you’ve got what it takes to keep going, you’ve probably reached a point where you’re properly tired of hearing it. You’ve probably tried to push through your share of difficult moments. You’ve probably had weeks where you’ve thought, I’m not sure I can do this for another month, let alone another year.
That exhaustion isn’t a sign you don’t have what it takes. It’s almost always pointing to something quite specific.
Two years
When I was running my floral business, several years ago now, I had a feeling, quite a clear feeling actually, that the right next step for the business was a concession at Selfridges. Not a hope. A knowing. I’d looked at the brand, looked at our work, looked at where the audience we wanted to serve was already shopping, and it felt like one of those moments where the right opportunity is sitting just on the other side of a door, and the only thing left is to find the way through.
So I contacted them. And they said no.
The first no didn’t feel terrible. It didn’t make me question whether the whole idea was wrong. It felt like a piece of information, which is what no’s actually are, if you let them be. I waited a bit, thought about why the no had come, and tried something else.
Eventually they came back with a question. Could you do flowers online for us?
I said yes. I had absolutely no idea how to do that. They had never sold flowers online before. We had never sold our flowers through anyone else before. We had to work out, properly quickly, how to design and deliver flowers as an online product through one of the most well known department stores in the world.
And it went really well. Properly well. Over our first Valentine’s Day, one of our products took around eighty per cent of all the flower sales going through the building, which is worth pausing on for a moment, because they had a florist in store at the time.
Which then opened the door to a conversation about the concession in store. Which is what I’d wanted from the beginning.
And here’s where most stories like this would wrap up neatly. The concession happened, the persistence paid off, the end. But that’s not how it went.
In the time between that first conversation and the concession actually opening, the senior team at Selfridges changed. The people I’d been talking to weren’t there anymore. The people who took their place hadn’t been part of any of the earlier conversations. The decision they were being asked to make, which was to switch out a long-standing brand and bring us in, was a big one. And reasonably, they wanted to be sure about it.
So I had to start again. Not from scratch, exactly. But with new people, in a new conversation, where the trust that had built up over the previous months was suddenly back at zero. And then it happened again. And in another form, again.
In total, it was two years. Multiple rejections. Multiple restarts. A final, very nearly final no for several reasons that all felt completely valid from the outside.
And we got there. The concession happened. It changed the trajectory of the business.
But I want to be honest about something. None of that two-year process felt particularly heroic from the inside. I wasn’t gritting my teeth and pushing through. I wasn’t telling myself I’d never give up. I was just doing the next thing. Often a small thing. Often a thing that didn’t obviously look like persistence at all.
What didn’t move
I’ve thought about that two years a lot, and about other examples in the business. Working towards collaborations with brands like Jo Malone, where the first answer was also a no, and where the way through was finding gentle, never aggressive ways to stay in contact and create new opportunities. The pattern is the same.
The persistence wasn’t the impressive bit. The persistence was actually pretty boring, most days. It was the foundation underneath the persistence that made it possible.
Let me try and name what I mean by that.
When I was talking to Selfridges, and then later when I wasn’t talking to them, and then talking to them again, and then having to start the conversation over with new people, the thing that didn’t move was my own understanding of what we were about as a business. What we did exceptionally well. Who we were really for. Why we belonged in that particular conversation, with that particular audience.
The clarity underneath all of it was the thing that didn’t wobble.
And because that didn’t wobble, the no’s didn’t actually feel personal. They didn’t feel like proof of anything. They felt like timing, or like a particular person’s view on a particular day, or like an opportunity that hadn’t quite ripened. They were information.
I think this is the thing that most conversations about persistence miss entirely. Because if you don’t have that foundation underneath you, if you don’t have a really clear sense of what you’re about and where you belong, then every no is doing something different. Every no is taking a little bit out of you. Because every no is, on some level, raising a question about whether you’re right to be doing this at all.
So when someone says to me, I just don’t think I have the persistence to keep going. Or when I notice in myself those weeks where everything feels hard and I’m wondering if I’ve got it in me, the honest first question isn’t, do I need to push harder?
The honest first question is, do I still know what I’m about? Have I drifted? Is the foundation still where it was? Or has it become a bit blurry, a bit borrowed from someone else, a bit shaped by what I think I’m supposed to be doing rather than what I actually do?
Because when the foundation is clear, persistence isn’t a thing you have to manufacture. It’s just what happens when you know what you’re doing and why.
Where this shows up
This is why I find myself coming back, again and again, to the conversation about positioning. About what you’re known for. About what your strengths actually are and how they’re already being used in your business, sometimes without you fully seeing it.
The creative business owners I work with most often, who’ve been doing real, serious work for years, are not lacking in determination. They’re some of the most determined people I’ve ever met. What they’re missing tends to be something quieter, underneath. The clarity that would make keeping going feel possible without depleting them.
A few examples of how this shows up.
Someone has been posting on Instagram for years and isn’t sure if any of it’s working. They’re not lacking in persistence. They’ve been showing up. The issue is that they’re not yet quite clear on what they’re actually saying, who they’re saying it to, and why those particular people would care more than any other particular people. So every post is having to work harder than it should. And eventually the persistence becomes exhausting.
Or, someone is having pricing conversations with potential clients and finding that they’re losing more than they should. They’re not lacking in confidence as a person. They’re often very confident in lots of areas of their lives. The issue is that their offer hasn’t been articulated in a way that makes the price feel obvious. So every pricing conversation has to be argued for, justified, defended. And eventually the persistence becomes exhausting.
Or, someone has been chasing collaborations or features or partnerships, and the no’s keep coming. They’re not lacking in courage. They’ve been brave repeatedly. The issue is that what they’re offering hasn’t been distilled into the version that the right person on the other side of the conversation can say yes to easily. So every approach has to work hard, and the no’s are accumulating in a way that feels personal.
In all three cases, the temptation is to look at the surface and conclude that more persistence is needed. More posting. More pitching. More conversations.
But the actual answer is almost always one layer down.
The persistence everyone talks about is real, and it matters. But it’s also a kind of symptom. A symptom of something underneath, which is the clarity that makes the persistence sustainable in the first place.
When there’s a clear foundation, the no’s don’t hurt the same way. They feel like information. The conversations you can’t get into yet don’t feel like personal failures, they feel like timing. The opportunities that aren’t quite ready feel like opportunities that aren’t quite ready.
And, quietly, the persistence becomes something that just happens, because you know what you’re doing and why.
If you’ve been feeling tired of trying, tired of pushing, tired of the gap between what you’re doing and what’s happening, the question worth asking isn’t whether you’ve got it in you to keep going. You almost certainly do. The question is whether what you’ve got going underneath is clear enough to make the going feel possible.
It’s the conversation I sit in with creative business owners more than any other, in the live session I run called The Missing Piece. What you’re actually about. What makes your work distinct. Why the right people would choose you rather than anyone else. The foundation that makes everything else start to work.
When that’s clear, the persistence becomes the easy part. Almost trivial. Almost not worth talking about.
Which is the version of persistence I’d wish for you.
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