Go Ahead, Be A Quitter

Teachers, coaches and parents all had a favorite phrase when I was growing up: “Don’t be a quitter.” Your ability to stick with whatever task you were on wasn’t just about developing the life skills of resilience and commitment; it was also apparently a test of your moral character. And I wasn’t about to have that called into question.

So at 7 years old, I fully applied this principle of “never, ever quit” to a series of 1970s sports biographies. The goal: I would not only read these books – I would read them perfectly from front to back without mispronouncing a single word in my head. You might think this sounds crazy; my parents definitely did. But that’s how I spent the summer of 1980. My biggest nemesis was the book on basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. About 10 or 15 pages in there was a reference to Puerto Rico, two words I always mangled. Because of that, according to my rules, I had to start the book over from page one. I don’t recall ever smoothly pronouncing Puerto Rico or getting anywhere near the end of the book before this stage of youthful madness, or at least the summer, ended.

I did, however, savor the irony recently when I happily quit reading a sprawling life of James Madison. This was to be the last in a quartet of Founding Father biographies I’d vowed to read after seeing Hamilton a year ago: Ron Chernow’s tomes on Hamilton and Washington, Jon Meacham’s study of Jefferson, and Noah Feldman’s history of Madison. After six months, about 2,000 pages, and a lot of late nights, I’d completed the first three and was close to claiming another victory for resilience.

Then an unexpected thing happened. The Madison biography started boring the hell out of me.

Part of it was that the actual life of Madison, who rarely ventured beyond Virginia, never fought in a war, and wasn’t all that smooth with the ladies, wasn’t nearly as gripping as those of his revolutionary compatriots. Also at issue: Feldman, the author, is a lawyer. And when lawyers start writing about other lawyers the energy can get sucked out of a narrative faster than you can say Puerto Rico. About a third of the way through, following a mind-numbing exposition on the intricacies of the Constitutional Convention, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“You know what?” I told my wife. “I really want to quit this book.”

“What’s stopping you?” she asked.

“Well,” I thought. “Just 47 years of habit and social expectations.”

But I quit anyway. It’s a liberating experience, and I look forward to doing it again in other arenas as well: home projects, TV shows, jobs, social organizations. The list of things you can quit is as long as your list of commitments. Still, before you start quitting things at a scale that would cause your childhood mentors to disown you, consider a few basic guidelines – what I like to think of as the Rules for Quitting:

• Don’t give up too early: If something’s worth starting at all, then it’s also worth giving it a fair chance. Showing up at a beginner tennis clinic and quitting after one session because you hit 10 balls over the fence isn’t an acceptable excuse. It could turn out that you have some potential if you hang around for five or six more sessions. Just because something is challenging – and many things are at first – isn’t in itself reason to quit. I stayed with the Madison biography for about 200 pages, hoping that the pace would pick up or that I would start underlining so many sentences – my best barometer for engagement with a book – that it would all be worth it. But it wasn’t, which brings us to the next rule.
• Understand your reasons: Going 15 or 20 pages without underlining anything or jotting a note in the margins means I’m not engaged with a book. That’s strike one. Sometimes, though, I’ll read a book for the fun of it, with no expectation of anything but entertainment. But the Madison bio felt like sitting through a college lecture. Strike two. I then ask myself a third question: “With everything else going on in my life, might this time be better invested somewhere else?” Strike 3. You don’t need three bona fide reasons every time you quit something. Just be sure there’s at least one.
• Take away something worthwhile: Almost every experience – and especially failed ones – harbors lessons that can help us in the future. So take a few minutes to reflect on what you’ve learned from whatever it is you just quit. If you did finally give up on tennis after those ugly clinics, maybe you learned that you like exercise and want to find another way to get it. Maybe you made a new friend. In reviewing the relatively few portions of the Madison bio that I’d marked, I was struck by this sentence: “In any historical era but his own, James Madison would not have been a successful politician.” This does fascinate me – the notion that context matters to success as much as our talent and effort. It’s the seed for a future blog post and a great insight to ponder in assessing my own career.
• Position yourself to quit again: Farnam Street, a phenomenal blog about better decision-making, had this to say: “as you read more books, your pile of unread books will get larger, not smaller.” In other words, the more ambitiously you read, the more you’ll come across books that aren’t worth finishing. In a similar vein, the more ambitiously you live, the list of things you quit will get larger, not smaller. You’re seeking experiences, going deep on the ones that are paying off, and letting go of the ones that aren’t. Following the Rule for Quitting will make it easier to figure out which is which.

You’ve probably heard that old adage on the ABCs of sales: “Always Be Closing.” How would your life be different and better if you weren’t afraid to “Always Be Quitting?”