Stepping back to regroup isn’t losing ground. It’s reloading.

Pausing gets confused with quitting because both look like stopping from the outside. They are not the same thing. One ends the attempt, the other collects what you learned, fixes the plan and goes again with better information. Pushing forward while everything is falling apart is not persistence, it is just motion.

If something is not working, give yourself a short pause with an end date. Use it to write down what actually went wrong rather than how it felt. Come back on the day you said, with one thing changed, and you will have lost nothing except the version that was not working.