The Wisdom of Quitting

My friend Ken Tennyson brought some deep goodness to Common Table yesterday, cutting against the grain of New Year Resolutioners everywhere by endorsing the counter-cultural idea that quitting is a good thing to do.

It might be a north-American ideal, or it might be connected to the good old ‘Protestant work-ethic’, but perseverance and determination and patience are all over the zeitgeist these days.  As children we’re told we ‘can do anything we want’, and so the adult versions of ourselves later imagine that the reason we’re not attaining everything we want must be because we aren’t trying hard enough.  Every politician-elect and every Olympic gold medal-winner proclaims the same advice to the watching world:  “Follow your dreams!  Don’t give up!” (utterly ignoring the fact that they represent an infinitesimal percentage of the human population).   And after hearing a few thousand versions of the ‘failure turned to fame and/or financial success’ archetypal story, we know what we must do:  double down and push harder and keep going, waiting for the day of glory which must be just around the corner.

Ken turned us on to some contrarian thinking from the Freakonomics podcast, so I had the chance to listen to the podcast a couple of times before Sunday, and then absorb the wisdom of the group gathered on Sunday morning.  These ideas are swirling all through my thinking these days, coloring my views of things like relationships and cars and career and even American Idol (I usually feel bad for the poor stooges who get mocked in the early episodes for their poor vocal abilities, but maybe it is actually a kindness that someone finally tells them the truth in no uncertain terms: they need to stop singing).  But even more, I’m thinking about a roughly 10-year span of my life where I was dutifully plugging away at two big projects (or was it three?) that might have been failed from the start.  I’m looking at these years from many perspectives, seeing how they were at the same time a tremendous waste of time and also transforming for me.  If I had possessed the courage to quit earlier, would I have missed out on some important lessons? Or would I have moved on to bigger and better things?

This business of quitting is obviously complicated, with the huge issue ‘How do you know which projects to quit, and which to persevere?’ hanging over the whole affair like the unanswerable question that it is.  But I’m grateful at the very least for some friends to give one another courage to make the counter-intuitive move to just quit the projects which are bleeding our energy without any real hope of reward.  After all, life is short, pain is debilitating, and grace abounds.  So I wrote the following responsive benediction to conclude our time together.

When we realize that we are bad at something, and hate it,

     We will quit.

When we feel like we need to impress God,

     We will quit.

When we are up to our neck in the ‘sunk cost fallacy’,

     We will quit.

When we are throwing good money after bad,

     We will quit.

When we are overwhelmed with tasks, and bored with every single one of them,

     We will quit.

When that voice in our head says, “Don’t be a quitter”,

     We will quit.