--- title: "When I Want to Give Up" url: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/when-i-want-to-give-up.md" canonical: "https://www.5whys.com/articles/when-i-want-to-give-up.html" published: "2015-06-11T04:28:07.403000+00:00" updated: "2015-06-11T04:48:50.737000+00:00" tags: ["Critical Thinking"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Roy Osherove shares the gumption traps picture he keeps on his office door and how naming his feelings helps him move on when he wants to give up at work." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # When I Want to Give Up When I'm at work and I suddenly feel like everything sucks and the world can just burn as far as I'm concerned, I take a look at this picture I found on the web a while ago, printed it and mounted it on my door: [![](https://www.5whys.com/img/posts/6c2b210e-4655535-26304912-thumbnail.jpg)](http://i.imgur.com/rxwEiSl.jpg) It helps me take an inward look and try to identify what exactly is it that I currently feel. When I can name the feeling(s) it generally becomes less of a blocking issue. Like a shadow under the bed that you shine a light on. I go through each one, asking myself: > "Do I feel like this now? Why?" . Maybe I just left a meeting where I felt the rug was swept under my feet. > "How do I feel about that now? does it fit one of these things? Oh, I think I'm just expecting fast results." Then I can plan my next steps.  This also reminds me that everyone feels these things from time to time. They are universal.   Some of them are temporary shortsighted views on a long running path (expecting fast results..).Some of them are just something to be acknowledged and dealt with (overworked). These things are also called "[Gumption Traps](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gumption_trap)" (Thanks, [John Crowe](https://twitter.com/TheCrow1213/status/606580150952697856)) and I find them quite helpful. ## Read next - [Developing Critical Team Thinking](https://www.5whys.com/articles/developing-critical-team-thinking.html): How the effectiveness, novelty and self-direction of critical thinking map onto growing a self-organizing team that keeps experimenting. - [Five Questions to ask yourself when getting advice about team leadership](https://www.5whys.com/articles/five-questions-to-ask-yourself-when-getting-advice-about-tea.html): Questions for testing any team leadership advice against the three team maturity stages, plus bonus questions about the author's hidden assumptions. - [Making your team manage their own work](https://www.5whys.com/articles/making-your-team-manage-their-own-work.html): Lior Friedman explains how a team leader can stop being the task dispatcher and teach the team to divide its own work using a visible task board. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/