There’s a point in almost every worthwhile pursuit when motivation stops carrying you. The excitement wears off after a launch and results take longer than expected. Customers say no more often than you expected, and now your best employees are leaving.

That’s usually when success becomes less about talent, intelligence, or expertise and more about what you do next. Steve Jobs understood this unusually well.

In a 1995 interview, he was asked about the factors that determine entrepreneurial success. He said:

I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.

Jobs went on to explain that building something meaningful inevitably brings rough moments when most people consider giving up. Without enough passion for the problem you’re trying to solve, he argued, you probably won’t stick with it.

There’s a version of perseverance that leaders should avoid. It sounds like, We’ve already invested too much to stop now. Or, We just need to keep grinding and work harder. That’s not Jobs’s version of the word.

Sometimes quitting is exactly what a smart leader should do. Markets change, and some products or strategies outlive their usefulness.

The better interpretation of Jobs’s advice is this: Be stubborn about the problem you want to solve, but flexible about how you solve it.

Jobs connected perseverance directly to passion . Research backs up Jobs’s intuition. In a study published in Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice , researchers examined 129 entrepreneurs and found that entrepreneurial passion helped explain why people who believed in their ability to succeed kept taking action.

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