When to draw a line?

All of us have been in this situation one time or the other in our lives. I have been in it plenty of times, and somehow I manage to get stuck every single time. It is the problem of 'not knowing when to stop'. Be it career, the affairs of the heart or the mind, I have been in places where I got too involved or didn't put in enough effort. Each situation has to be handled in a different way.

Sometimes we are trying too hard for something, whereas, in reality, its not worth the time and effort. But we still try, we still hope, we carry on and we don't give up. This is a place where we should have given up a long time ago and started looking at newer frontiers. But then we didn't want to give up because we thought we can survive and we can make it happen. The outcome - we don't end up getting what we wanted and somewhere the whole experience hardens us, makes us a cynic, and somewhere it makes us stronger.

On the other hand there is a situation where we have been trying for a while, and just when things get really bad, when we are hanging on to a cliff and don't know where to go, during the darkest moment... we Give Up. We think its not worth our time and energy and move on to other avenues, whereas, in reality all it needed was just a little more push, that last surviving breath and a little more effort to succeed. The outcome - sometimes we move on never looking back, but sometimes we regret not hanging in there for just a little while longer.

The fact is, each situation can belong to either of these two criteria. The question is, how do we know where to draw a line? How do we know when to give up and when to keep trying? At the end of the day, its not really about what is right or wrong. Each experience is unique and gives us a lesson to learn, but after a while, it would be nice to know...when to draw a line and when to keep pushing harder to reach the final goal.