The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz is one of the most powerful books about entrepreneurship that I’ve read.

The book reads like an action movie; a sequence of gruelling challenges the author had to go through while starting his business. While reading it, I often thought to myself that if I had been faced with all those hardships I would simply have given up.

Ben, however, didn’t – and his persistence prompted another thought: how do you know when it’s time to give up? Is there a definitive moment when you tell yourself, ‘Well, nice try, but now I have to stop’?

I thought I’d reached that point in 2015. At the time, I was living in a two-bedroom apartment in Northgate. The sum total of my belongings was a fridge, a microwave and a blow-up mattress that stayed in my TV area and served as a sleeper couch and coffee table. Business was slow and hard and I found myself wondering, once more, if I’d made a mistake when I’d left my job.

I hit rock bottom one evening when I woke up hungry in the middle of the night and made myself a midnight snack. I was eating on the blow-up mattress, when my knife missed my snack and hit the mattress instead (a note here: it’s not the wisest choice to use a knife on a blow-up mattress). As the air hissed out of the mattress, I panicked. I was sinking, this was my only bed, I didn’t want to sleep on the cold, hard floor. At 1am, I rushed to the garage shop to stock up on superglue and sticky tape, and after two hours (and seven failed attempts) of trying to fix the mattress, I felt myself succumbing to despair. This is what your cool life as an entrepreneur gets you, I told myself: you’re sleeping on the floor.

I don’t think I slept that night. I was too consumed with my thoughts. Is this it? Should I give up now? If I just had a job I wouldn’t be on this concrete floor in such discomfort.

Yet even that moment wasn’t enough to stop me. And that makes me think that there isn’t a universal answer to the question, ‘How do you know when to give up?’ All I know is that you officially fail at something when you stop trying. Until then, you have a fighting chance.

If it were up to me, I would tell everyone I know that they must never give up. However, I also believe that sometimes you reach a point where you have to take a pause, press the reset button and start again. And that’s okay. That’s not necessarily giving up; it’s tackling the challenge from a fresh perspective.

So, again: keep searching, stay in the fight, keep knives away from the blow-up mattress, and remember that it’s okay to press the reset button.