Why do people give up so Easily?

So often, I see someone make a new site and it looks amazing and see huge potential because it’s updated each day with exciting new things, and then it suddenly stops. Either the person goes on hiatus or the site completely dies. I think I’ve worked out why this happened.

I think the biggest reason why people give up easily is because we get over the “newness” stage. To understand this concept, we first need to know that pleasure and excitement is all the brain’s doing. When we have a new experience, there’s a chemical called opioids that’s released, it makes us happy. That’s why we are so fascinated with new things, particularly new ideas, new toys, new foods. However, if you noticed, anything the second time round doesn’t feel the same. When we start eating the same food each day, we gradually get tired of it. When we are told the same things, we get vexed. This is because once we’ve had an experience, nerve cells called neurons take over the job in responding to that piece of information, which allows other neurons to do their tasks. It’s as if the mind has built up an immunity to this thing, because it’s no longer new. That’s why when we experience something a second or third time, you don’t get that rich hit of pleasure, because these cells are like, “yep, been there and done that… WILL YOU GIMME SOMETHING NEW?!!!”.

Let me also explain that opioids, what gives us the pleasure is the same ones that give you pleasure when you take drugs like heroin. It makes your brain go all “WOOOOW” and wanting more.

Now that we’ve understood that new experiences give us pleasure, of course starting a new site would make people excited for a while! How long it lasts depends on what’s motivating the person, if the person is excited about new comments, they may stay excited until comment drops. The type of excitement we get is probably similar to when we first start a new relationship. (If we’re not excited about something new, it’s probably because our minds are giving us fear to protect ourselves, when we don’t know what may potentially hurt us…”

I think this is a big reason why so many people start a site but never keeps going, because they don’t feel that new excited feeling anymore. Most people, like myself, probably make websites to get certain type of responses. They may base their motivation on the amount of visitors, commenters, hits or anything else that relates. If that isn’t met, it could be a big loss of motivation.

Another reason why I think people would give up is if they ran across difficulties. For example, they can’t seem to figure out how to do something, or they don’t have the time, or can’t think of ideas, or run across rude people. These things will all create that “avoidance” feeling where we’ll try and avoid it at all cost. It’s natural for us to want to avoid when we are faced with conflict, especially with people. It’s just a natural part of us, because it’s a survival instinct to want to stay away from people that make us feel uncomfortable. In fact, we feel uncomfortable because we sense they may not be friendly and cause us harm.

Now I bet we all want to know, how would we keep something going? When that new excited feeling is gone (the kick, I should call it), it truly takes work and dedication, because it seems so hard for us to keep something up when we don’t feel excited about it.