When you start a business, and really whenever you start anything new, you can never expect things to go perfectly well all the time. Hiccups will always happen. Therefore, the question is not if they will happen, the point is, what do we do when they happen?

I’ve been following highly successful entrepreneurs and business owners for at least 10 years now and I love to hear about their journey into becoming who they are now and how they got to build what they did. All of them have at least one story of how things went wrong.

Very recently I’ve heard the story of how one very successful marketer lost the brand that he had been working on and nurturing for a few years. Everybody knew his company, his brand, his products, etc. he had built a following for some time only to realize one day that somebody has trademarked his brand. He received a notification warning him he had to stop using his brand. Was it his brand then? Nope. Was it fair? It certainly was not.

Another example that I have recently known about was about a very successful entrepreneur who created a company based on software. One of his former partners in other ventures decided to launch a software company that is clearly aimed at becoming a direct competitor.

If you are expecting that things will always be the same, try again. It’s a given that things will change.

Now, you might be wondering, what did these two people in my examples above do?

They just kept working. Too many times, especially when we are starting something new, we encounter an obstacle that makes us doubt whether we are going the right way or not. We are often too quick to quit.

Whenever you find a challenge on your path to whatever it is you would like to achieve, do not wonder if that is the sign that you should give up and stop trying, wonder instead what is the opportunity that lies behind the challenge, what is the learning that you will be getting after you figure out what to do next.

So when is it the right time to stop pursuing your dream? When we are talking about putting your business out there, when you know that you are meant to add value to people. Yup. The answer is you never stop. Keep going.