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You Don’t Need a New Life. You Just Need to Stop Quitting.
We’ve become obsessed with finding the perfect path, the perfect purpose and the perfect version of ourselves. But what if the thing that changes your life isn’t finding the right thing? What if it’s finally staying long enough to see what happens?
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how obsessed we are with starting over.
New city. New job. New relationship. New routine. New personality, if necessary…
The moment something becomes boring or difficult, we start questioning whether it’s actually right for us. Am I even on the right path.. Should I maybe pivot? Oh, maybe there’s something better waiting for me somewhere else.
I am very guilty of this too... Which is why my conversation with Dayan Kole really stayed with me.
Turning a jump rope into a multi-seven-figure business is certainly one way to make everyone question what they’re doing with their lives, but its not just that.. It was much more about what happened before any of that.
During COVID, Dayan went back to Bulgaria, stopped exercising and gained around 15 kilos, reaching in total more than he was comfortable with. Someone even directly told him that he was fat… To which I said; fuck that guy! He didn't take it particularly seriously until he saw himself in the mirror and realised he was out of shape.
His response wasn't to punish himself, it was to decide he needed to be more respectful towards his body.
So he started skipping…. And guess what he was terrible at it. He was tripping every third or fourth jump. People laughed at him. Even his first videos were, in his words, funny because he could barely jump rope. He posted them anyway.
Honestly, that part interests me more than the transformation. Because we're very comfortable celebrating people once they're good at something. We're much less comfortable watching them become good. Especially publicly, let’s be honest, no?
We want the finished version. The six-pack, the successful company, the impressive CV, the beautifully executed idea. We don't particularly want to watch someone be bad for six months while they figure it out.
But Dayan stayed… And eventually, the thing he started purely to change his body became a business.
Before @swissskip, he'd already tried several businesses. AirPods cases, clothing resale, trading. He even put 20,000 to 25,000 Swiss francs of his savings into trading when he was around 20. None of it worked…
Looking back, he thinks part of the problem was that he always had a Plan B. Then, when he started the jump-rope business, he wrote something on a whiteboard along the lines of: You're going to do it until it works.
He bought 500 ropes for 2,500 francs and told himself he wasn't going to stop until he sold them. On launch day, he sold one. ONE!
Which, I imagine, is not the kind of launch story most entrepreneurs put in their pitch deck. How many of us would have potentially given up at that point, really think about it.
But you know what, he didn't stop. And now, five years later, @swissskip is a multi-seven-figure company. And suddenly that one rope looks a little less pathetic, doesn't it…
The thing Dayan kept coming back to was consistency, again and again. He told me that he used to have a habit of starting something, getting good at it quickly, getting bored and then moving on. And eventually, he realised that if you keep doing that, you don't actually build anything.
“Even sometimes, even if you don't like it, you just need to continue doing it,” he said.I think this is something we've forgotten. We talk endlessly about motivation and discipline, but sometimes the real skill is much less exciting.
It’s just staying. Doing the thing when you're not particularly inspired by it. Doing it when nobody is watching. Doing it when the results aren't obvious yet. Doing it when you're starting to wonder whether you've chosen the wrong thing.
Dayan's philosophy is so incredibly simple: Ten minutes a day. His ropes come with a 30-day challenge because the point isn't to completely transform your life overnight, it's to prove to yourself that you can keep one small promise.
Then one thing leads to another; You read for ten minutes. You train for ten minutes. You work on the business. You become a little more consistent. And eventually, your life starts looking different without you ever having had one dramatic moment where everything changed.
“Small steps, consistency, and you reach big goals,” he told me.Maybe that's the part we don't like hearing, because we want the breakthrough. We want the before-and-after. We want to know exactly what we're supposed to do and when the results will arrive.
But most of the time, you won't know, you'll just have to keep going long enough to find out.
There was another thing I found interesting about Dayan. He never actually wanted to be an influencer. He's introverted, he likes his private life, he doesn't drink, doesn't really party and doesn't particularly enjoy telling millions of people what he did yesterday.
Yet he has built a huge audience. He told me that if he could choose, he'd rather simply work on his brand without sharing his personal life. But nowadays, he says, being the founder behind the brand is part of the job.
Which feels very 2026.
As we all know by now, it is no longer enough to build something good... You also have to become the face of it, film yourself using it, explain your morning routine and occasionally let several million strangers into your personal life so they feel emotionally invested in your weighted jump rope.
And yet, if you only knew Dayan through his videos, you might not know that he's also a husband and a new father.
His daughter, Kiana, was almost three months old when we spoke. He described becoming a father as the most beautiful thing that has happened in his life. It reminded me how little we actually know about people online. We see the result, we don't see the years that produced it.
Maybe that's what I took away from our conversation, not that everyone needs to start a business. Not that we should all buy a jump rope and suddenly become entrepreneurs. Although, after this conversation, I did find myself thinking I probably should start skipping seriously and not just once a month if I am really feeling like it without giving up too quickly… We might be too quick to assume that boredom means we're on the wrong path.
Sometimes you aren't lost, sometimes you're just impatient. Sometimes you don't need another beginning. You need to stay with the one you've already created.
Imagine if you don't become confident by constantly telling yourself you can do something, but you become confident by proving it to yourself.
One small promise at a time, one bad attempt at a time, one day when nobody notices.
Then another… And another… Until, eventually, you look back and realise the thing you thought wasn't working was quietly becoming your life.
So yeah, like I was saying, maybe you don't need a whole new life, maybe you just need to stop quitting the one you're already building? Believe me, there is something here.
Photo © Photography of Dayan Kole via Instagram by (@dayan.kole)
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