If not giving up was always the right answer life would be so easy. History shows us that sometimes quitters prosper and sometimes they miss out. Knowing when to quit and when to keep going is one of the most difficult questions and so we asked folks we admire to tell us how they think through this question.

Lacey Vandermeer | Photographer

The main reason I keep going and don’t give up are some of my clients wanting to book photos again and continue to work with me. At times I feel defeated with lack of work but at the same time I find myself finding new ways to work. This year with the pandemic has probably made everything very challenging with all small businesses. For me I am trying to do more landscape photography taking pictures of local street art, local areas of Denver with the protestors and working on making my art standout from the rest. I think one way to make sure you keep going is to challenge yourself. Read more>>

Joanthan Dritto | Jeweler

Following my gut is one of the most important things in my life especially in the world of creative living. In a world where nature is nurtured into the “stable choice”, why would I leap into the unknown? Why do I keep pushing my dreams up the mountain when they seem to want to landslide down? It is that feeling in my GUT and my SOUL, and when I hit those walls I sit down to visualize my dreams ahead. I visualize my dream bright and strong in front of me. Visualizing all the work it will take to keep my dream in the light. I then visualize all the factors that make me want to quit like the financial side of paying bills and buying materials to the creative side of having art blocks, creative slumps, and backed up orders. Now that all that is visualized I then pick the negative away, to see that even if none of those factors existed, I would still choose to wake up and make art every single day. Read more>>

Aria Fawn | Artist

This one is tricky. Especially as we may not always know what we want. Even knowing what we truly want may lead us down a path that will, very likely, come with some failure until we figure it out. I actually went through numerous, art related career possibilities that I pursued and had to give up when I felt in my gut that I would not be happy doing them, and that the original glamor they held was just that, false glamour over a lifestyle that would have been ugly for me. And it was at that point that I started pursuing the least stable of my career options, which was independent art. Making the art I wanted to make, and finding a way to live off it. And while I now know many successful artists in that field, at the time it was still a faraway concept to me. Read more>>

Jeremy Dougherty | Founder

It’s simple, we don’t, we very simply do not give up. At the beginning of my career I was working as an analyst in Washington, DC. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur but also knew I needed to understand the basics of business before I started my own company. During this time, I believe it was the summer of 2009, I discovered a book written in 1937 by an author named Napoleon Hill, called “Think and Grow Rich”. The gold I took out of this writing was about visualization. Hill makes a succinct point about deciding what kind of life you want for yourself, then taking 15 minutes every day to visualize what that life looks like. I had heard of this idea before, but the concept never stuck until I read the details of what Napoleon described. Read more>>