Books & Articles

We’re taught that winners never quit. What if that’s the lie that’s wearing you down?

For over twenty years, Stacy Van Moroz has sat across from people who did everything right — who stayed, who pushed, who dug in — and were still miserable. As a personal coach, counsellor, pastor, and distance runner, he’d spent his own life believing the same gospel: that grit is always a virtue, that quitting is always a failure, that the tortoise always beats the hare.

Then his own body forced him to walk away from the thing he’d built his life around — and what he found on the other side of that decision changed everything he thought he knew about persistence.

Persistence Is Futile is a book about knowing when to stop. Drawing on decades of coaching work, a lifetime of running, and the losses that shaped his own family — a father who worked himself to death, a brother whose faith carried him to the end, a sister who nearly didn’t survive an aneurysm and came back changed — Moroz makes the case that our cultural obsession with never giving up is quietly doing us harm, one white-knuckled year at a time.

Through the lens of a forgotten hundred-year-old fable — Lord Dunsany’s The True History of the Hare and the Tortoise — Moroz reframes the hare not as a cautionary tale, but as a model of wisdom: the ability to read your own exhaustion honestly and choose a different path before the cost becomes unbearable.

This isn’t a permission slip to give up on everything hard. It’s a guide to telling the difference between the discomfort that’s building you and the persistence that’s quietly costing you your life — your health, your relationships, your one chance at actually living.

If you’ve ever wondered whether staying was really strength, or just fear wearing strength’s clothes, this book is for you