When Does Not Giving Up Become Stupidity?

November 4, 2026

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20min read

Evening Thoughts of Elvis — On ambition, ego, bad decisions, and the fine line between persistence and being a complete idiot.

I’ve spent almost seven years pursuing an idea that eventually became MANEFORGE. We’ve been selling products since January 2025, and I’ve learned more about business during this time than I ever expected.

But building a brand from scratch has been much harder than I imagined. And despite all the progress we’ve made, there are still days when I ask myself whether we’re actually moving in the right direction.

Am I ambitious, persistent, or just a fucking idiot?

That’s a question I’ve been asking myself more often than I’d like to admit.

We’re constantly told to never give up, to believe in ourselves, to follow our dreams, and that anything is possible if we work hard enough. And don’t get me wrong, I believe in a lot of that. I genuinely believe that almost any idea has the potential to become something great.

But surely there must be a point where determination stops being admirable and starts becoming stupidity. Where you’re no longer pursuing a dream but simply refusing to accept reality.

The problem is, how the hell are you supposed to recognize that point?

The Stories Nobody Wants to Tell

It’s interesting how the whole world loves talking about people who succeeded. We celebrate successful entrepreneurs, incredible ideas, companies that started in garages, and people who built something out of nothing.

Their stories are everywhere. On TikTok, Instagram, in podcasts, books, interviews, and pretty much every business event you attend.

And then you start believing that this is how things normally go.

You have an idea, you work hard, overcome some obstacles, almost give up a few times, and eventually make it.

Beautiful story, right?

But what about everyone else?

What about the people who worked just as hard, believed just as strongly in their ideas, sacrificed years of their lives, invested their savings, and eventually had to close their businesses?

We rarely hear about them.

And it’s not necessarily because they did something wrong. Their stories simply aren’t as interesting to the public. Nobody is particularly excited to watch a documentary about a guy who spent eight years building a company that eventually closed down.

At least not compared to watching someone become a millionaire at 24.

I originally had some pretty dramatic business failure statistics in my head. Something like 90 or 99% of businesses failing within their first three years. But after checking, those numbers are actually wrong.

According to the Swiss Federal Statistical Office, around 64% of newly founded Swiss businesses survive their first three years, and roughly half are still active after five years.

That’s better than I thought, but it still shows how uncertain entrepreneurship can be. And let’s not forget that surviving doesn’t automatically mean you’re profitable or that your business has reached its full potential.

Yet what do we mostly see?

Success stories.

I think social media makes this illusion even stronger. We see something going viral, a product suddenly becoming incredibly popular, or some guy claiming he made six figures in three months, and we start believing it’s almost normal.

But we see those people precisely because something extraordinary happened to them.

It’s the same with viral content. Someone creates a video that gets millions of views, and suddenly everybody wants to know the secret behind it.

Well, good luck repeating that another 20, 50, or 100 times.

Sometimes it’s the idea, sometimes the timing, sometimes how you present it, and sometimes things just happen to work out.

And because we mostly see the people for whom it worked, we start believing success is much more common than it actually is.

Which brings me to something I’ve been experiencing myself.

Apparently, Making a Good Product Isn’t Enough

When we started working on MANEFORGE, I had this rather naive expectation that if you make a genuinely good product, people will buy it.

Sounds logical, doesn’t it?

You spend years developing something, make sure the quality is excellent, carefully choose ingredients, pay attention to packaging, and create something you genuinely believe is better than a lot of what’s already available.

And then you put it on the market.

Well, congratulations. Now the real challenges begin.

Because suddenly you realize that your wonderful product has something called a price. And that you’re competing with companies that have been around for decades, produce millions of units, and have marketing budgets you can barely imagine.

You also realize that most people don’t even know you exist yet.

And that making a good product and actually selling it are two completely different things.

We’re approaching two years of selling MANEFORGE products, around three years of building the brand itself, and almost seven years since I started pursuing the idea behind it.

During that time, I’ve learned an incredible amount. I’ve also discovered that I knew much less about business than I originally thought.

I studied industrial engineering, I’ve always been interested in entrepreneurship and startups, attended business events, and genuinely believed I had a pretty good understanding of how these things work.

I even tried to approach a lot of things by the book.

Because that’s how we learn, right? You study something, follow the principles, make reasonable decisions, and supposedly increase your chances of success.

And then reality comes along and shows you that you actually had no fucking idea what you were getting yourself into.

Of course, there are reasons why you can’t always do everything by the book. Sometimes you don’t have enough money, time, people, or other resources.

But the biggest surprise wasn’t that things were difficult. It was discovering how many things I didn’t even know I needed to know.

And the really uncomfortable part is that you usually discover this only after making some expensive mistakes.

The funny thing is, when I look at where we are today compared to when we started selling, I see an enormous difference. In knowledge, experience, processes, connections, and understanding of our own business.

But when I look at how much effort and investment it has taken to get here, I can also understand why someone looking at the business purely from the outside might question whether it all makes sense.

And this is where things get interesting.

You Can Convince Yourself of Almost Anything

One thing I’ve noticed is that you can look at exactly the same business from two completely different perspectives.

If you want to find reasons to stop, you’ll find them immediately.

Look at the money you’ve invested, the time you’ve sacrificed, the opportunities you’ve missed, or the competition you’re facing.

You’ll probably find enough reasons to convince yourself that you should have stopped a long time ago.

But if you want to continue, guess what?

You’ll find reasons for that too.

Maybe customers are coming back. Maybe sales are improving in a particular market. Maybe you’ve met someone who could open an important door. Maybe you’ve finally figured out something that wasn’t working for the past six months.

And suddenly you’re thinking, okay, let’s give it another push. Let’s change this, improve that, try another approach, or give ourselves another year.

Both perspectives can be supported by real numbers and actual developments.

So which one is right?

As an engineer, I like approaching things analytically. I like numbers, reports, comparisons, scenarios, pros and cons, and trying to understand what different decisions could lead to.

But I’ve also realized that even when you’re looking at actual data, you can still be influenced by what you want that data to tell you.

You focus on the promising indicators because they give you hope. And sometimes you might give less importance to the negative ones because they’re uncomfortable.

Or you do exactly the opposite when you’re having a particularly bad day.

The difficult part isn’t finding reasons to continue or stop.

It’s figuring out whether you’re actually making a rational decision or just looking for evidence that supports the decision you’ve already made.

And I don’t think that’s something entrepreneurs are always particularly good at admitting.

Including myself.

The Ego Nobody Likes to Talk About

There’s another thing I think we should talk about more openly.

Ego.

Because let’s be realistic, when someone starts a business, there’s often more behind it than just a good idea.

Maybe you want to prove to yourself that you can do it. Maybe you want to prove something to other people. Maybe you’re trying to compensate for something you feel is missing in your life.

Maybe you simply want to become independent, financially successful, or build something that belongs to you.

I think there can be a hundred different reasons why someone decides to become an entrepreneur.

And I sometimes wonder whether someone who’s completely satisfied with their life would even want to start a business in the first place.

Why would you voluntarily introduce that much uncertainty, stress, financial risk, and responsibility into your life?

Of course, the potential benefits can be enormous. But so can the negative consequences.

A normal job usually gives you a certain level of stability. You finish your work, go home, spend time with your family, enjoy your hobbies, and don’t necessarily have to think about your job for the rest of the evening.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting that life. In fact, I understand why many people prefer it.

We’re not all supposed to become entrepreneurs, and we don’t all have the same priorities or tolerance for risk.

And before someone misunderstands me, I’m perfectly aware that not everyone has the same opportunities either. The country you’re born in, your financial situation, family circumstances, and even your gender in certain parts of the world can massively affect what you’re realistically able to pursue.

But among people who do have the opportunity, I think many like the idea of entrepreneurship much more than the reality of it.

Everybody wants to be rich. Far fewer people want to go through what it might actually take to get there.

And then there are people who really try.

When you’ve spent years building something, invested your own money, told friends and family about your ambitions, and made the business part of your identity, quitting becomes much more complicated.

Because stopping doesn’t just mean closing a company.

It can feel like admitting to yourself, and everyone else, that you were wrong.

That your idea didn’t work out the way you imagined.

That all those years of believing in it didn’t lead where you expected.

And that is something our ego doesn’t particularly enjoy.

So perhaps sometimes we continue not because the business is showing enough potential, but because we simply don’t want to admit defeat.

I think it’s worth asking ourselves that question occasionally.

Even if we don’t particularly enjoy the answer.

Playing Against Giants With Pocket Money

There’s something else that puts this whole situation into perspective for me.

Money.

What feels like an enormous investment to one person can be almost irrelevant to another.

If someone tells me they’ve invested €100,000 into a business, my immediate reaction depends on who’s telling me.

Is it someone earning €2,000 a month who has spent years saving that money? Or someone like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos?

The number is exactly the same, but its meaning is completely different.

And that’s something I think about quite often with MANEFORGE.

The amount of money we’re investing is significant to us. It’s money we could save, invest in stocks or ETFs, spend travelling, or use for a hundred other things.

Instead, we’ve decided to invest it in building our own brand, with all the opportunities and risks that come with it.

And then you look at the brands you’re competing against.

Companies with enormous production volumes, established distribution networks, marketing teams, agencies, and budgets that are on a completely different level.

I sometimes think our entire yearly budget probably wouldn’t even compare to what some of these companies can spend in a day.

So how are you supposed to compete with that?

It’s not exactly a fair fight.

Of course, being small also has advantages. You can make decisions faster, adapt, experiment, and perhaps connect with customers on a more personal level.

But those advantages don’t magically remove the financial reality.

You still need customers. You still need sales. And sooner or later, the numbers need to make sense.

Which brings me right back to the question.

At what point does continuing to fight become admirable, and at what point are you just refusing to accept reality?

What If All Those Bad Decisions Were Actually Good Ones?

Here’s another philosophical question I’ve been thinking about.

If you eventually become successful, does that automatically make every bad decision along the way a good one?

Because think about it.

You make a decision based on the information and experience you have at that moment. Naturally, you believe it’s the best decision available. Otherwise, why would you make it?

And then, six months later, you realize it was a terrible decision.

You lost money, wasted time, or created problems that could have been avoided.

But what if that mistake taught you something important? What if it introduced you to someone who later helped you? What if it forced you to change your approach, and that change eventually became the reason you succeeded?

Was it really a bad decision then?

I’m not sure.

I don’t believe every bad decision magically becomes a good one just because everything works out in the end.

But I do believe that almost every experience has something valuable to teach you, provided you’re willing to learn from it.

Of course, there’s a limit to that argument.

Losing €100,000, seven years of your life, or damaging an important relationship doesn’t suddenly become a wonderful experience just because you learned something.

Some lessons are simply far too expensive.

And that brings us back to risk.

Before making a major decision, I think you need to understand what you’re potentially risking and what you could gain. Analyze the possible scenarios, think about the best and worst outcomes, and ask yourself whether the potential reward justifies the risk.

If you understand the consequences and consciously decide it’s worth trying, then I think the situation changes.

Because at least you didn’t blindly jump into something without considering what could happen.

And personally, I’ve always been more of a guy who’d rather apologize afterwards than ask for permission beforehand.

My parents could probably tell you quite a few stories about that.

I’ve always preferred trying something myself, even when someone warned me against it, and occasionally coming back afterwards to admit, okay, you were right, that really was a terrible idea.

Some of those lessons were expensive.

But I also know that I wouldn’t be happy living a life where I constantly avoided trying things because something could go wrong.

I don’t particularly like the phrase YOLO, but ultimately we most probably get one life.

And I think we should try to make the most of it. Whether that’s in our career, relationships, family, hobbies, or whatever we’re passionate about.

One of my biggest goals is to reach old age with as few regrets as possible.

And for me, not trying something I genuinely wanted to do could become a bigger regret than trying and failing.

That doesn’t mean every risk is worth taking.

But it does mean that the value of something isn’t always measured exclusively in money.

Would I Start MANEFORGE Again?

Someone recently challenged me with a very interesting question.

If you could go back seven years, knowing everything you know today, would you still start MANEFORGE?

My immediate answer was that I wouldn’t start it once.

I’d start it twice.

Because knowing what I know today, I believe I could build it so much faster.

I know which people to approach, how to approach them, what mistakes to avoid, which things are important, and which things we spent far too much time worrying about.

I’d probably do almost everything differently.

Except for a few things where I’m not willing to compromise, especially product quality and our environmental priorities, including packaging.

Those are things I still believe in as strongly as I did at the beginning.

But then I thought about the question a little longer.

Because knowing everything I know today wouldn’t only mean knowing how to build the business more efficiently.

It would also mean knowing exactly how difficult, expensive, stressful, and time-consuming the whole journey would become.

And suddenly my answer wasn’t so clear anymore.

Would I really go into it if someone showed me everything that was waiting for me?

I’m not sure.

I genuinely couldn’t have imagined that building a grooming brand would be this difficult.

And even if someone had told me, I probably wouldn’t have believed them.

I’d likely have wanted to try it myself anyway.

That’s just how I am.

But looking at it more rationally, perhaps I would have made a different decision.

And that’s an interesting contradiction, isn’t it?

I don’t regret starting MANEFORGE. I believe in what we’re building, and I’m convinced that I’ve grown enormously because of it.

Yet I’m not completely sure whether I’d recommend the same journey to my younger self if I could show him the actual costs beforehand.

Maybe that tells us something about how differently we evaluate decisions before and after experiencing them.

The Difference Between Giving Up and Changing Direction

One thing I’ve learned is that continuing doesn’t necessarily mean doing the same thing over and over again.

Because that really would be stupid.

If something isn’t working, you need to understand why. You need to listen to customers, follow the market, analyze the results, and change your approach.

And that’s basically what we’re doing all the time.

Pivot, pivot, pivot.

Sometimes it feels like that’s half of entrepreneurship.

You change your marketing, your strategy, your priorities, your products, or the way you communicate with customers.

You try something, see what happens, learn, and adjust.

Because ultimately, the market decides.

You might be convinced that you’ve developed the greatest product in the world, but if nobody wants to buy it, your personal opinion doesn’t really matter.

At some point, you need to accept that and change something.

For us, there are also encouraging signs.

One of the things that gives me the most hope is seeing customers come back and buy our products again.

Because that tells me something important.

People have actually tried what we make, and some of them like it enough to return.

We’re also meeting new people, building relationships, discovering opportunities, improving our processes, and learning things that we simply didn’t know when we started selling in January 2025.

If I compare where we are today with where we were back then, I see an enormous difference.

Not everything is reflected in the financial results yet, but the progress we’ve made in knowledge, experience, and understanding our own business is very real.

And I genuinely believe these improvements can eventually turn into better financial results too.

Could I be wrong?

Absolutely.

But that’s exactly the point. I can’t know for certain how this story ends.

And I don’t believe anyone else can either.

The Most Expensive Reason to Keep Going

There’s another argument that often comes up when I think about stopping.

If we stop now, we lose the chance to see what this could become.

All the money, time, and effort we’ve invested won’t turn into the business we wanted to build.

And the only possibility of recovering that investment through MANEFORGE is to continue.

But there’s a problem with that argument, and I’m aware of it.

The money we’ve already spent is gone regardless of what we decide tomorrow.

Continuing doesn’t guarantee that we’ll recover it. It means putting even more resources at risk.

I understand that.

And still, knowing how much we’ve already invested makes stopping more difficult.

Not just financially, but emotionally.

Because it’s not simply a question of whether we should invest another amount of money. It’s a question of whether we should walk away from something that we’ve spent years building, just when we feel we’ve finally started understanding how to make it work.

What if we stop six months before things would have turned around?

What if the next opportunity, the next partnership, or the next adjustment would have made the difference?

But then again, what if we keep saying exactly that for another five years?

I don’t think there’s an easy answer.

And this is where I start questioning whether entrepreneurs are truly capable of judging their own businesses objectively.

We like to believe we are. We make reports, calculate margins, look at performance indicators, and try to make rational decisions.

But in the end, we’re human.

We have emotions, ambitions, pride, and expectations.

And when something means a lot to you, separating those feelings from your decisions becomes extremely difficult.

Perhaps that’s also part of what makes entrepreneurship possible in the first place.

Because if every founder looked only at the probability of success, the financial risks, and the number of things that could go wrong, I wonder how many interesting ideas would ever become businesses.

But passion alone won’t pay the bills either.

So you need both.

The difficult part is knowing how much of each.

So, When Does Persistence Become Stupidity?

After all these thoughts, I wish I could give you a clever conclusion.

Some formula or rule that tells you exactly when to continue and when to stop.

Unfortunately, I don’t have one.

I believe in MANEFORGE. I believe we’re moving in the right direction, and I believe our future can be much better than our past.

I’m not continuing simply because I can’t accept the money we’ve already invested being gone.

I’m continuing because I genuinely see potential, because we keep learning and improving, and because I believe there are opportunities ahead of us that we haven’t fully explored yet.

The moment I truly believed this business couldn’t work, I’d stop.

At least that’s what I tell myself.

But then I have to ask myself whether I’d actually recognize that moment when it came.

Or whether I’d find another promising indicator, another reason, or another excuse to give it one more try.

And maybe that’s something I won’t be able to answer until I look back at this whole journey in a few years.

There’s another funny thing about all this.

If MANEFORGE eventually becomes a huge success, people might look back and say, “See? You just have to believe in yourself and never give up.”

But if it doesn’t work out, some of those same people will probably say, “Well, you should have known when to stop.”

And the decisions we made along the way could have been exactly the same.

Only the outcome would be different.

So perhaps success doesn’t automatically prove that your decisions were right, just as failure doesn’t necessarily prove that every decision was wrong.

As for me, I still believe this is worth pursuing.

Maybe we need another year. Maybe two. Maybe things will develop completely differently from what we expect.

I don’t know.

What I do know is that we’re much better at what we’re doing today than we were two years ago, and I still see reasons to believe in what we’re building.

Whether that’s persistence, passion, or a little bit of stupidity, I guess we’ll find out.

And if you’re building something yourself, perhaps it’s worth occasionally asking the same uncomfortable question.

Not because you should give up.

But because believing in something and questioning it shouldn’t have to be opposites.