In my last post about Quitter’s Day, I referenced the author of the book The Dip, Seth Godin. Something he’d said about quitting stayed with me, rolling around in my mind, and so I bought the book. In it he makes the argument in favor of quitting! And quitting often! Say what? In a culture that teaches us never to give up, just how is quitting a behavior to advise? What about Vince Lombardi declaring, “Quitters never win, and winners never quit!” We all want to be winners, right? But what Godin details is the fact that winners quit all the time. They just quit, he argues, the right stuff at the right time.
When Godin refers to “the dip,” the low point in the process of making a change or pursuing a new skill, he emphasizes this as a choice point. In facing the dip, we can either push through, recommitting to our goal, or we can quit and give up. It’s the choices we make about what we pursue and what we choose to pass up on that he believes we need to be more conscious of. He is a big advocate for creating clarity and having the courage to focus our energies on what will be most beneficial in the long run. This means clearing out what is not effective to make room for what is effective. In other words, strategic quitting.
There are times when we should quit. The successful people he writes about quit a lot. They just quit the things that are getting in the way or bogging them down. In life, because of our belief that quitting is a moral failure, we hold on to too many things. One result of this is getting spread too thin. We overload our schedule and then become burned out by trying to do too much. In parsing our energy into so many directions, we also dilute the ability to really sink into anything. This might be the ‘jack of all trades, master of none” tendency. We have trouble saying no to things because we don’t want to miss out. In our attempts to be well rounded or have it all, we may lose the opportunity to really delve into an experience or savor it.
Another way we hold on to things we should quit is what Godin calls “the cul de sac.” In contrast to the dip, the cul de sac is a dead end curve. It leads to nowhere. We go round and round without moving forward. The most important thing about a cul de sac is to identify it as quickly as possible in order to get out of it. A dead end job or a hobby you no longer enjoy can keep you locked in. It uses up your energy, but doesn’t offer the feeling of growth or success that pushing through a dip would give. But cul de sacs can be traps, as we get comfortable in them. They give us security and the sense that we are engaged in productive efforts, but they also burn us out and lead to a feeling of complacency.
So how do we know when to push through a dip or if we should quit? The answer lies in the goal you have. The very process of evaluating whether a pursuit or strategy is worth sticking to is a key to success. You may realize you just don’t enjoy or benefit as much as you thought from the original goal. Then give yourself permission to move on to things that do! Stop paying for expensive lift tickets and cabins if freezing in a lift line has taken the joy from your regular ski adventure. Put your time and money into something else! Maybe snowshoe, or snowmobile, or go somewhere warm!
Another possibility that might emerge in the quit or not to quit decision is to quit a particular strategy, but not the overall goal. Perhaps you need more skill and should take a class, perhaps you need to improve an area of your idea or narrow your focus in order to bypass a road bock. Every successful product or person had to keep being reinvented in order to get better. At first things are always “meh.” Then you get the feedback and make improvements. By sticking with something through little adjustments (or little quitting) you clarify and purify your result. Think of all the glitches when we first started using new technologies? What if a company had given up at the first version? Or insisted it was the best without adaptation? I would still be waiting for the Netflix envelope in the mail!
One of the most helpful suggestions I found from The Dip is the idea to create a quitting plan. Before you hit the point of frustration or self doubt, decide what resources you are willing to commit. What is a reasonable amount of time and money to put towards the goal? If you wait until you hit the dip, you will be letting emotional reactions make the decision for you. Assume from the start that you will get angry, depleted, and want to quit. And then, when you hit that emotional low, refer to your plan to identify if it is truly the right time. Too often we quit things for the wrong reasons, never knowing how it would be if we had stuck with it for the right reasons.
Quitting the dip is often a short term reaction. It helps to take the long term view to evaluate your goals and efforts. Are you making progress in small steps? Is the long term outcome worth the effort you now know is required? What are the options available to ride through the dip? Quitting a job doesn’t mean you’re quitting your career. Quitting a gym doesn’t mean giving up on your health. The long term goals are what will help us to rededicate with a new strategy.
And what if the goal is just enjoyment? Sometimes we choose to do things that we know we’ll never be good at, but we like to do it anyhow. Appreciating what brings us joy is another element of deciding if we should quit or keep going. Perhaps we can call these circumstances Ferris Wheels. We go round and round, but its for fun and we really enjoy the view. If we quit things merely because we aren’t good enough at them, we miss out on a lot of success at happiness. Strategic quitting involves assessing our goals, our values, but also our sanity!
