How to Quit Without Being a Quitter
Have you ever tapped out of a commitment like a job, a class, a project, a relationship? Something you started with longer term intentions but at some point began to wonder if continuing was really the wise call?
Let me ask this: when you finally threw up your hands, did you feel exasperated and just simply couldn’t go on?
If the answer is, “yes” you’re not alone. And like the rest of us, you waited too long — maybe far too long — to pull the trigger. Because in one way or other you didn’t want to feel like a… QUITTER!
The other day I was sharing with a friend about the many clients I’ve been coaching recently through difficult “quit” decisions. As I was describing some of the reasons I believe tapping out is a particularly difficult but important task for most people, he put up a protest: “I don’t want to hire someone who has a pattern of hopping from one job to the next. If I’m going to invest in someone’s career, I want to know they are committed to my company. I don’t want to hire a quitter.”
He’s not wrong. We live in a world where fake-it-till-you-make-it rules the day. But quitting a particular thing is not the same as being a quitter. Sure, if quitting becomes a pattern of running away from things, I might argue there’s a quitting problem — or maybe a choosing problem. But we worry that if we back out of something we started, it will undermine our personal integrity — and that fear often tethers us to unhealthy things for too long.
The reality is, there are things in life we will need to quit and it’s important to find the freedom and confidence to tap out of something you should no longer be in. This is a deeply layered topic; below I simply outline three important perspectives to get you started if you’re feeling stuck. My hope is to encourage you to give yourself some grace to approach your stuck-ness more openly and explore quitting as a healthy option that can actually advance your personal integrity, values and growth.
To quit or not to quit? That is, indeed, the question.
Heads or Tails?
I believe the first step in evaluating a potential quitting decision is that it is binary: quitting is a two-sided decision. It is at the same time a decision to remain in something and to remain out of something else. Always. If you choose to walk on Path A, you are choosing to NOT walk on Path B. It is a daily, active — not passive — choice.
Part of the struggle is that we often focus our attention on the “thing” we are feeling stuck in and overlook the cumulative impact it’s having on us or on better alternatives. When we begin to mull bailing on something, we are biased to think about what we’re giving up. When you ask yourself, “do I stay in this [thing] or not?” notice how we immediately evaluate what we would lose — not what we’d gain. We would indeed give something up, but it’s not only about what gets left behind. One of the biggest obstacles to quitting is this one-sided assesment.
Annie Duke authored the insightful book, “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away” that plunges deeply into our topic here. Her collection of top-shelf research and vivid stories shed light on why we often bypass the option of healthy quitting. She is also an accomplished professional poker player, so has honed the fine art of quitting — folding a card hand. As she unpacks the tension between what she calls “grit” (sticking to something) and “quit” decisions, she reminds us that we are always gaining new information about a path we’re on, and that new information should inform our current and future decision to stay in or exit something. She poses: “imagine if you had to marry the first person you ever went on a date with?”
The point is, we start things with limited information and new information should be acknowledged and incorporated into an ongoing re-evaluation. In all aspects of life, there are other proverbial fish in the sea; other opportunities are continually being passed over when we remain in something. It’s vital to be cognizant that every time we call “heads” we are choosing to not call “tails,” or the other way around.
What are you hanging onto that’s not doing so well? What might you thereby not be participating in that could be? I’m not advocating a self-indulged, unchecked pattern of jumping from one thing to the next, always believing there’s something better around the corner. But being aware that any decision to remain committed to something is a decision to forego something else. This longer term view is a first step in fairly evaluating something that may be holding you back.
Onramps and Offramps
One of the other obstacles I often hear from clients is they have not yet identified something else to replace the thing they want out of — if I do quit this, what’s next? “Life with my romantic partner isn’t working out, but I haven’t met anyone else yet.” Or, “I am so ready to retire, but I have no idea what I’m going to do afterwards?”
This thinking is commonplace and understandable. However, this is simply a way of resigning ourselves to momentum. And, sadly, if we are in a situation that isn’t serving us in the ways we need, we are allowing momentum to carry us adrift. How far from land before we cry for help?
Italy has high-speed toll roads called autostrada that have long distances between exits. Driving one, recently, I was focused more on managing the driving culture and crowded autostrada around Rome than watching for my exit. As I passed it, I breathed an expletive, knowing the next offramp was far down the road, ultimately adding 45 minutes to my drive time.
Life’s momentum does the same thing. When we are barreling along a particular road that we know we should be exiting from, it is very difficult if not impossible to identify a compelling exit. We might notice something that catches our interest, but we sail past it in the fast lane of busyness without giving it a fair shake. “I’ll quit this when I find something better” is a common trap because we are so enmeshed with the thing we want to quit, we fail to spot promising alternatives.
Additionally, we prefer it when the offramp of one thing is the onramp to the next. We crave this synchronicity as a sign the universe approves our longing to quit. How many relationship breakups have you seen where suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, one partner breaks things off. The story goes that this partner had been unhappy for a very long time. Then you discover they had found someone else before breaking off the former relationship. It lacks integrity, doesn’t it? The lack of integrity, really, is that they never fully addressed their disquiet until there was another alternative in place. Smooth (or bumpy!) offramp to a new onramp.
I counsel my clients that onramps and offramps don’t need to line up and, in fact, it is often only after taking an offramp and exiting one thing that you discover all sorts of possible onramps to other roads — ones you were unaware of or never would have noticed while driving 100km/hr. on the autostrada of life. Fork-in-the-road moments are not usually obvious when we are so busy; we often need to slow way down or stop something altogether to identify choices.
Maybe it’s time to take the next offramp and explore the side streets?
Fail, Quit, Start, Repeat
Design Thinking is a very specialized approach to problem solving. It’s relied upon heavily in innovation labs, start-ups, social enterprise and even, life design. The legendary d.School at Stanford University bills itself as “a place where people use design to develop their own creative potential.” d.School chiefs Bill Burnett and Dave Evans ultimately spun up an offshoot of the d.School called, the Life Design Lab at Stanford, employing the rigors of design thinking to “tackle the wicked problems of life and vocational wayfinding.” One byproduct is their aptly titled book, Designing Your Life, which drives home the importance of “prototyping” or experimenting your interests and activities to learn about yourself. This isn’t simply about trying new things or approaches, but rigorously analyzing personal discoveries from each iteration.
Design thinking espouses the rewards of failure: fail fast to succeed sooner. In this case, failure simply means you haven’t yet wholly built a life that is thriving as much as it could be. And building that takes multiple, successive tries. It accepts failure as part of any discovery process — particularly, self-discovery. The follow on, of course, is that once failure is exposed, quitting that failed path is really the only way forward. The longer you remain on the wrong road, the further you wander from the life you want. To take this process seriously, Evans and Burnett urge granular learning from every quit event — or as it’s called in design thinking, “protype.”
For example, let’s acknowledge that your current job is an experiment; a prototype. In this context, you’re not evaluating the simple question of whether or not you like your current job. Your objective is rather to understand what aspects of it are life giving or life sucking. Notice how this orientation emphasizes how various parts of the job affect you, not an attempt to evaluate whether the job is nominally speaking, “good or bad.” We might easily convince ourselves (or someone else may attempt to convince us) that we have a “good job.” But it may not do good to us — or not all of it, anyway — and isn’t that what we should be driving at?
I had a client once that had steadily risen through the ranks of his organization and was overseeing a fairly large department. Turns out, he didn’t enjoy managing people; he loved the actual R&D work he was originally hired for, years before. The whole job was draining him, but I had him take the time to carefully evaluate every aspect of his daily work. He was able to identify the discrete parts of it where he thrived and the other parts that just didn’t suit him. Instead of quitting the company, he talked to his director about quitting parts of his job and expanding others. They worked out a transition that moved him back into the work he loved…and he continued to have an outsized impact on his company.
Notice the “quit” here: it’s well considered and particular; it’s iterative tweaking. The experiment as manager failed. He acknowledged the discovery and quit that part of it. The fresh start was a fine-tuning of accumulated learning.
And this is key: when you take time to learn and understand yourself better (in any context, not just a job), when you quit and restart, you are really moving forward, closer to what you’re ultimately aiming for — and with much more clarity about what it is you’re ultimately aiming for.
Circling back to the conversation with my friend who wouldn’t hire a quitter: someone who quits strategically is developing a much better understanding of who they are and the kind of role that will work for them — and the company which employs them. A design approach to any type of “wayfinding” initially involves fast, rapid failure and quit cycles that get you where you want to be faster than being dragged along by the momentum of a choice that turned sour.
My professional training as a coach is fixated on always helping clients take forward action or deepen their learning. I would be as troubled as my CEO friend if a client had an unproductive pattern of quitting and job-hopping. I’d turn on the spotlight and dig into this. Most of us have seen people jump from one relationship to the next, always dissatisfied, never really taking the time to understand what they need or long for in a healthy relationship. The, “I’ll know it when I find it” is uninformed and, quite frankly, lazy thinking.
Again, these are only 3 aspects of evaluating a decision to stay in or exit something you may feel stuck in. Things like personal values, life stage, our tendency to double-down on decisions heading south are but a few other considerations that come into play. Then, of course, the topic of “how to quit well” is another discussion altogether. But, to start the process, remember:
- There are always other opportunities you are presently choosing to pass on;
- It’s hard to identify them when you’re speeding along, head down;
- Thoughtful quitting is an essential part of personal growth and discovery.
If you’re stuck in something you feel in your heart you need to quit (or others are imploring you to!), it’s likely you need to take action. But…dig into the decision to really understand as many whys as possible so that when you do quit, you know exactly what you want to say no to…and what you want to say yes to. Seek a coach or thought-partner to process this with and take time to write down your reflections. Together, this can help ensure that every stop is an important zig or zag that ends up triggering a leap forward.
