I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned this before, but I don’t think I went into detail about it – I have a very busy week coming up, with a paper due on Monday morning, an exam on Monday night, a paper due Tuesday afternoon, and a quiz on Wednesday morning. So, I’m not going to have time to make very detailed blog posts for a while.

The Daily Post at WordPress.com

Topic #302: When is it a good time to quit? There’s a common sentiment that you should always tough things out and that it’s weak to quit. When is this not true? How do you know you should quit something?

I chose to answer this topic because it’s a very common misconception that once you start something, you should always commit to it and persist until you finish. Although that’s a good way to approach things, it won’t necessarily yield the best results.

The best example that I use to support my argument is scam inheritance letters. Almost all of us have gotten them before – the emails that tell us that we have inherited a fortune from a remote relative, and that we must follow through with the instructions of the email to get the money. Most of us know that these are scams and don’t even open the emails, but unfortunately, some people fall for the trick.

If you have not thoroughly investigated these emails or have not seen someone else’s investigation results, you might not know exactly how these scams work – and that what I’m here for.

Normally, when you reply to one of these emails, you will receive a response from someone telling you that you need to first submit a small sum of money (maybe around $10) to start the claiming process. Generally, this request is justified by saying that it’s a filing fee for paperwork. It doesn’t seem like a huge deal, because the money that you are eventually going to get is in the millions.

After you send in your money, you might get a response from the person saying that, unfortunately, $10 was not enough to finish the paperwork and they need $20 more. Again, under the same logic as before, $20 more is nothing compared to the millions of dollars that you will get from this inheritance, so you send another $20 their way.

A few days later, you might get a response telling you that there was another problem – such as the money contained in a bank vault – and you need to submit a bit more money to get it released. They might possibly request an additional $100 charged from the bank and $50 charged from the service representative. Again, $150 isn’t that much more money, so you agree and pay.

After a few weeks, you notice that you haven’t heard back from the person who was helping you claim the money, so you reply to the email again asking what happened. Apparently, the person who was originally helping you no longer works at the location and you must be reassigned to a different rep­resentative, which will cost $200 for a refiling fee. You’re getting suspicious as to why all these fees are piling up so quickly, but you still comply with the request because you have the big picture in mind – a couple million dollars.

Your new representative helps you out and emails you back telling you that the money is being with­drawn and will be sent on its way to your house shortly. You get excited as you anticipate its arrival.

A few days later, you receive another email telling you that your claim is being challenged with striking evidence and that you will need a lawyer to fight for you. Fortu­nate­ly, your representative found a good and cheap law­yer for you that will only cost $500, and will put you at a good chance of winning your money.

Things continue to go downhill as the lawyer requires additional support, and you must pay up an additional $2,000 for more legal assistance. At this point, many people have run out of spending money and are slowly eating up their savings. But, you realize that you’ve al­ready spent a lot of money on this, and if you quit now, everything will go down the drain, including the couple million dollars. You stick with your original plan of claim­ing your inheritance and keep paying all your fees.

A week later, you get another email saying that the lawyers are charging an additional $5,000. At this point, from a third-person viewpoint as a reader of my blog, you are probably realizing where this is going, and can easily judge that it’s best to cut losses and quit now, because the couple million dollars doesn’t even exist. Unfortunately, those who have a strict philosophy of never giving up won’t do that, and instead, will persist and keep going for the millions.

My point here is that instead of going blindly for a goal, you should analyze your situation each step of the way. Even if you have suffered losses, you should analyze those losses and determine if it would be better to take those losses and quit rather than continuing and not realizing that the goal you want to achieve is impossible.