#88: How to be a quitter
Never give up, right? Winners never quit and quitters never win! All nonsense, I'm afraid. The sensible advice is much more measured and boring: quit when it's appropriate to quit. But how do you know when it's appropriate to quit? And have we really got quitting all wrong? Listen on, friends, and find out.
Here's Annie Duke talking sense about quitting on The Spark podcast. Download the Core Values exercise here, and the 5 Whys exercise here.
Reference:
Duke, A. 2022: Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (London: Penguin).
Episode transcript:
Hey, I’m not a quitter. Except when I am.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello again, friends! I’m recording this ten days before I do this year’s Wales Marathon. I don’t like doing marathons, and I can feel my hips seizing up just thinking about it. I only sign up for them to force myself to do the training, which means forcing myself to do longer runs than I’d usually be inclined to do on days when I’m not inclined to do any running at all. But last year, I did the Wales marathon and I quit 10 kilometres, or 6 miles, from the finish. I made a podcast episode about it: episode #65: Reflections on a recent failure. So, I thought I’d try again with the marathon and see if I can make it across the finish line this time. I’ll let you know whether I managed it in the next episode.
Anyway, with the anniversary of my episode on failure fast approaching, this seems like a good time to do an episode on a related theme, and one that applies equally to last year’s marathon failure: quitting. I’ve mentioned my plans to dive into this topic in a few previous episodes, and so, here we are.
I got to thinking about quitting - what it is, exactly, and our attitudes towards it - after my friend Estella pointed me towards the work of Annie Duke, via her appearance on the BBC Radio 4 podcast, The Spark. I’ll put a link to it in the episode notes. Duke has written a book called Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. It contains lots of great real-life examples of times when people refused to quit something and that turned out to be a bad idea - like the mountaineer who refused to give up the climb in spite of dangerous weather, and who ended up never coming home as a result. Duke dives into the science of quitting, and talks about why it can be so hard to do and how we can do better at it. And she’s got an impressive track record as a canny quitter: she quit her PhD program, became a successful poker player, and then quit that too while she was still ahead. If you need some practical advice on when to quit, read her book.
It’s not going to surprise you to hear that in this episode, I want to take a philosophical approach to considering quitting. When we claim to value not quitting - as we almost invariably do in cultures like the UK and the US, according to the examples in Duke’s book - what exactly are we valuing? And does our valuing it make sense, when we apply a bit of pressure to it and when we look at it from a few different angles? Are there new perspectives we can take that will help us think differently about quitting (and not quitting) and help us see clearly what decisions will best serve us?
So, first. What is it about refusing to quit that we find so valuable? Is it even a value? I think it probably is, or at least there’s a case for arguing that it is. Think of the Core Values exercise, which you can download from the Resources page of the Academic Imperfectionist website. It’s basically a big list of values, and the idea is that you choose the ones that are most important to you, and then you narrow down your choice until you come up with the one value that is most fundamental to you. A refusal to quit - or an equivalent term - isn’t on the list, but we can imagine it being there, I guess. In other words, we can think of refusing to quit as just another value, like any other, which can guide us in life and shape our identity and which we can work to maximise - but I’m not sure that’s the most helpful way to view it, for a few reasons, a couple of which I want to mention here. One reason is that it’s not clear exactly what it means or what we admire about it. Despite our culturally ubiquitous ‘Never give up!’ attitude, there are plenty of cases where we view quitting as the right decision, only we don’t always notice, because we don’t always use the term ‘quitting’ to talk about the positive examples of quitting. Sometimes we do - but, as Duke observes, this tends to be when the thing we’re quitting is something obviously bad. Quitting smoking, quitting a life of crime, these are things we can all get behind. Sometimes, though, the thing we’re quitting, or considering quitting, isn’t straightforwardly good or straightforwardly bad - it’s the dose that makes the poison. It’s the context and the background. Is that person who’s bent on wooing someone they’re in love with, and who refuses to take no for an answer, a romantic role-model or a harasser? Is someone who quits the rat race, giving up their well-paid job in banking and going off to live in a cabin in the woods, admirably affirming the important things in life or showing signs of a mental health crisis? These examples help illustrate that whether ‘Don’t give up!’ is good advice really depends on the context. Like, don’t give up on what? And for what reason? And, in order to do what else? And so the refusal to quit - which we sometimes refer to positively with words like tenacious and determined, and sometimes negatively with words like stubborn and obstinate - the refusal to quit isn’t an unqualified good. It can be good when it’s paired with good judgment. But on its own, less so.
The fact that there’s an ‘it depends’ dimension to the question of whether the refusal to quit is a good thing leads me to another reason why it might not be helpful to view not quitting as just another value. (Too many ‘nots’ there - sorry.) Instead of viewing it - tenacity, determination, whatever you want to call it - as a value or a quality worth developing for its own sake, perhaps we should instead view it as a strategy for realising other values. So, if your most fundamental value is compassion, or curiosity, or self-knowledge, then tenacity is something you can employ to help you realise that value and maximise its role in your life. That’s where the value of not quitting can come in - it’s not an end in itself, it’s something that’s worth having when it helps you realise what is valuable for its own sake.
Now, even our most fundamental values are subject to change, which is why I’ve said in the past that the core values exercise is worth repeating every six months or so. Things happen, we change, and our values change. And sometimes our values conflict, or the cost of realising them is too high, and we have to reconsider them or balance them against other things. For example, suppose that curiosity is your most fundamental value, and that leads you to pursue a life of exploration and experimentation, but then an important relationship in your life comes to an end and that leads you to value something else more highly - community, for example. Or perhaps freedom is what you most value, but then someone in your life needs extra support from you and you realise that what you now care most about is love or connection or compassion rather than freedom. Life is messy, right? Picking values from a list is helpful as a rough guide for helping crystalise what’s important to us, but in reality the things we value are more like a web than a bullet point list. Realising an important value isn’t something that happens in isolation, it has effects elsewhere in our lives. And the value of not quitting, as a tool for realising what we most value, depends on how well it reflects the messiness of life. Not quitting is a good thing when it enables us to remain focused on what’s most important, but that means you have to be good at identifying what’s most important. If you’re not a quitter, you need to know yourself, or you’re going to be in trouble.
So, how do you do this? How do you ‘know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, know when to walk away, and know when to run’, to quote that great philosopher, Kenny Rogers? Well, as I’ve said, Annie Duke has some great advice for you here - she goes into the psychology and even the neurology of quitting, and suggests ways you can strategise to ensure that you stick with your projects only as long as sticking with them is going to serve you. I want to add some advice to the mix, too.
First, as I’ve said, if you’re determined not to quit, you need to know yourself. You need to know why you’re continuing to pursue whatever it is you don’t want to give up on, and why it’s important. And that means you need to be in touch with your values. Do the Core Values exercise if you haven’t already, and do it again if it’s been a while. Bear in mind that ‘Because I’m not a quitter!’ is not a good answer to the question ‘Why am I not quitting this?’. Thinking that it is a good answer is … well, dangerous, frankly. Because if all it takes to satisfy you that you’re making the right choices is not quitting, then you’re out of touch with what’s most likely to serve you. Instead, download my 5 Whys exercise, which is also available from the Resources page of the Academic Imperfectionist website. Use it to explore why you don’t want to give up. It might turn out that you don’t want to give up because there’s something really important at stake - in which case, crack on. But equally, it might turn out that there’s something problematic underlying your reluctance to quit. Perhaps you don’t want to quit because you’re afraid or because you don’t want to let people down or because you just don’t want to accept that things aren’t going to work out. These are difficult things that would benefit from exploration and reflection, rather than simply being shouted down by your ‘Not a quitter!’ slogan.
Perhaps it might help to lessen the sting of facing up to being a quitter - when it’s appropriate, and when carrying on is unhelpful - to note that lots of good advice about how to succeed is, in a way, advice about when to quit. Annie Duke notes that Angela Duckworth’s well-known advice about grit - which largely involves continuing to pursue a goal even when things are hard - doesn’t simply boil down to ‘never quit’; Duckworth also talks about the value of exploring lots of different things and quitting the ones that aren’t working so well for you. Then there’s Warren Buffet’s famous but probably apocryphal lesson for success, sometimes referred to as the ‘25/5 rule’. The advice is, basically: write down your 25 top career goals, identify the 5 that you care most about, and avoid the other 20 like the plague. In other words, quit most of the stuff that you care about. (By the way, if you’re scratching your head and wondering how anyone manages to come up with 25 career goals, let alone a list long enough to identify the 25 top ones, I’m right there with you.) What Duckworth and Buffet are both talking about here is the importance of identifying what’s most important, focusing on that, and reducing the time and energy you spend on lower priorities. If you can’t get comfortable with quitting, try on their alternative framing for size.
One problem with the language of quitting is that it shines a light on what you’re going to stop doing, and says nothing about what you’re going to be doing instead. I talked about this back in episode #49: Say no to FOMO. What I said there was that FOMO - fear of missing out - focuses our attention on what we’re not doing or getting, and ignores what positive things we do or get as a result of not doing that thing. In that episode, I encouraged you to ask: ‘if I say no to this new thing, what could I say yes to?’ Saying no to one opportunity frees you up to embrace other opportunities, ones that will be more satisfying for you. The same advice applies to quitting. Ask yourself: ‘if I stop directing my energy into this project, where might I get to direct it instead?’ Because quitting isn’t simply about shrinking your world, it’s about growing it in new directions. It’s a bit like pruning a plant - a metaphor I’m not entirely comfortable with, given my aptitude for plant-murder. I have an apple tree in my garden that’s growing too tall. My green-fingered friend Philippe is going to chop some bits off it for me, so that next year it will be stronger and the apples will be even better. If you think of your life as an apple tree, which branches have got too long and thin, and are taking goodness away from the rest? Which other branches might grow stronger, and which fruits bigger and sweeter, were you to do a bit of careful pruning? What shape is best for your tree, and what do you need to do to achieve that? Ok, I’ll stop with the apple tree stuff now, and leave you with one final question. What good things could you achieve in your life if you were to quit dunking on quitting?
Next time, friends.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d consider leaving a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You’ll find links there to The Academic Imperfectionist on Twitter and Facebook too. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via my website or by tweeting your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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