Resilience, Tactical Retreats and the Ideas That Won’t Leave You Alone

Never give up, never surrender…be resilient!

Resilience. Such an important word.

To me, it means not giving up. Enduring. Keeping going when the odds are against you.

It can be a superpower if you learn how to harness it. Many people give up too quickly. They walk away just before something begins to turn. They mistake difficulty for failure, or delay for defeat.

But there is another side to resilience that does not get talked about enough.

A tactical retreat is not the same as giving up.

When the original Mathatar project didn’t succeed, it was a hammer blow. I had invested everything into it: hopes, desire, time, energy, money — everything. For it to fail just as it appeared to be gaining traction was incredibly difficult.

The company folded. The loss was immense. I was personally devastated.

But I never quite gave up.

Over the ten years since the original idea, and the seven years since the business failed, I would still find myself saying, “One day, I’d really like to get Mathatar made.”

That sentence stayed with me.

Resilience is often talked about as toughness: the ability to keep going, take the knocks, push through, carry on and get there in the end. There is truth in that. Life, business, creativity and relationships all require grit.

But there is a difference between resilience and plain old stubbornness.

A business idea rarely arrives perfect. A book rarely begins as a polished manuscript. A career rarely follows a neat, straight line. More often, good ideas have to be lived with, questioned, reshaped, tested, doubted and rebuilt.

Sometimes they need time.

Sometimes they need a different version of us to be ready for them.

When Mathatar was first envisioned, it was an idea for a game to help children engage with maths in a different way. I believed in it completely.

But that route didn’t work out.

Despite extreme stubbornness on my part, I could not keep it alive in that form.

Years passed.

The idea waited.

I kept saying, “One day…”

I remember someone once telling me, “Give up on that old idea. It’s a pipe dream. It’ll never happen.”

I thought hard about that comment.

Was he right?

Should I give it up?

Sometimes, hanging on to an idea too long can be worse than giving up too early. Resilience can become stubbornness. Stubbornness can become obsession. And obsession, if we are not careful, can stop us from moving forward.

That is not resilience.

Resilience is not blind optimism. It is intelligent hope. It is the ability to step back without walking away completely. To let an idea breathe. To let yourself recover. To accept that the first route may not have been the right route, without deciding the whole journey is over.

One of my sayings has always been:

“It’s impossible, but doable.”

I suppose that is somewhere between blind optimism and a positive attitude. But perhaps that is where resilience often lives — in the strange space between realism and belief.

Mathatar needed time to grow.

Or maybe I needed time to recover from the trauma of the first failure.

Time to heal. Time to think. Time to become someone who could see the idea differently.

A tactical retreat.

In the end, with time given, the idea came back. Not as a game this time, but as a story.

Mathatar was reborn.

And perhaps that is the lesson.

Resilience is not always about charging forward. Sometimes it is about knowing when to pause. When to regroup. When to accept that the old version has gone, but the heart of the idea is still alive.

Some ideas are not dead.

They are waiting.

And sometimes, so are we.