Quitting: A Life Strategy

Introduction

Quitting is an act of love.

It’s also an escape hatch, a long shot, a shortcut, a leap of imagination, a fist raised in resistance, a saving grace, and a potential disaster—because it may backfire in spectacular ways, sabotaging careers and blowing up relationships. It can ruin your life.

And it can save it, too.

All in all, though, it’s a gesture of generosity toward yourself and your future, a roundabout way of saying, “Not this. Not now. But later… something else.”

You might not see quitting in such a positive light. I get it: For a long time, I didn’t see it that way, either. In fact, that’s not even close to how I viewed the prospect of giving up as I sat cross-legged on the grimy linoleum floor of a studio apartment in Morgantown, West Virginia, one memorable night, weeping with abandon, tormented by the need to make a drastic change but fearing the judgment that would ensue, wondering how I could possibly endure the next ten minutes—much less the rest of my life.

Later, I would play this low point for laughs. Years after the fact, I’d make a joke out of it: “Just imagine,” I’d say, “me at nineteen, huddled on the floor, crying my eyes out and using a bath towel to blow my nose—because a Kleenex just wasn’t up to the job. Drama queen alert!”

When I entertained friends with the story of my initial foray into graduate school, which had necessitated leaving home and living on my own for the very first time, I’d whip out fancy words like “disconsolate” and “bereft” and melodramatic phrases like “fathomless despair.” I’d roll my eyes and snicker at the picture of silly old me.

But at the time it was happening, I didn’t snicker. Because it wasn’t amusing. Making fun of the memory was a way of walling off the raw misery of that moment: I really did sit on a dirty floor and sob into a giant towel, overwhelmed by a hopelessness so sweeping and intense that I could barely breathe. Classes had just gotten underway at West Virginia University, where I was employed as a graduate teaching assistant while pursuing a doctoral degree in English literature. Things were not, as you may have inferred by now, going well.

I was lonely and desperately homesick. I hated my classes—both the ones I was taking and the ones I was teaching. I hated the university. I hated my apartment. I hated Morgantown. In short, I hated everything—especially myself. Because I believed I ought to be able to handle this. In theory, grad school had seemed like a perfect fit, even though I was younger (and as soon became clear, appallingly less mature) than a typical grad student. But here in the real world, it was a different story. I couldn’t stop the torrent of negative emotions. And giving up wasn’t an option. Giving up would mean I was a loser.

A bum.

A washout.

That night—the night of the Tragically Soggy Towel—I’d plunged to an emotional rock bottom. I bounced once, twice, three times, then stuck there. I gave up and called home. My father answered.

“I can’t do this,” I said, blubbering and snuffling. “I just can’t.”

I fully expected him to reply, Don’t be such a baby. Stick it out. You’ll be a better person for it. But my dad, a mathematics professor who under normal circumstances was a hard taskmaster with no sympathy for snivelers, must’ve sensed that a tough-love pep talk—Suck it up, Buttercup!—wasn’t what I needed right then.

In a gentle voice, he replied, “It’s a three-hour drive. I’ll be there in three hours.”

I spent the next month or so hunkered down in my bedroom in the home I’d grown up in, afraid that if my friends found out I was back—that I’d bailed on my fellowship and flat-out fled—I’d be branded a quitter. And probably ostracized. I decided to beat them to the punch and ostracized myself.

Gradually, I began to feel a little better. I applied for writing internships. I ended up in Washington, DC, working for investigative journalist Jack Anderson. That, in turn, led to a job at a small-town newspaper, which led to a job at a bigger newspaper. Finally, I ended up at the Chicago Tribune, where my work won a Pulitzer Prize.

Yet as I sat there on that sticky floor with a towel clutched in one hand and a phone in the other, filled with dread as I contemplated calling home and admitting defeat, I wanted to tough it out. I summoned up the memory of every motivational speech I’d ever heard, every bright and shiny aphorism. I tried to be my own personal drill sergeant, giving myself firmly worded pep talks:

You can do it!

But I couldn’t.

And so I quit.

If I had to choose the catalyst for this book, I’d put my finger right there: the night in Morgantown when I sat in a defeated heap, shaking with sobs and wondering what was going to become of me.

Giving up was survival instinct, pure and simple. Yet before I was able to even consider doing it, I had to override a ton of powerful messages, the ones that tell us there’s something weak and shameful and cowardly about quitting—even when we’re emotionally and spiritually hollowed out. My mind and my body were offering me clear, unmistakable signals that I simply wasn’t ready to be a grad student at that point. Later, yes: I earned a doctoral degree at the Ohio State University. But not there. And not then.

Better days eventually came along, but only after I’d screeched to a dead halt, healed a bit, and finally moved forward—well, maybe sideways—when the time was right. Only after I’d berated myself for being a shiftless lout. Only after I’d called myself all kinds of ugly names:

Screwup. Sissy. Dumbass. Chickenshit.

Only after I’d sat in my bedroom for a while, wincing when I looked in the mirror—because what I saw was a girl who lacked grit. Who didn’t persevere. Who couldn’t cut it.

Later, I began to wonder: Why had I put myself through such an ordeal? Not the ordeal of going to grad school, mind you, but the psychological hell that commenced when I decided to quit grad school. Why did I engage in such ferocious self-loathing? Weren’t things bad enough already?

I understood why I’d felt that way—quitting reeks of capitulation, of surrender—but I couldn’t figure out where such a strange notion had originated in the first place. Who says that quitting is ill-advised? When and where and why did the idea arise? The animals with whom we share the planet aren’t burdened with an anti-quit bias. They keep their eyes on the prize: survival. If an activity isn’t working, if it isn’t providing sustenance, they quit without a backward glance. They have to—if they want to live. Expending too much energy in a futile pursuit leaves them spent and, hence, vulnerable to predators. And we human beings are at our best when we do the same—when we quickly reassess strategies that aren’t getting us anywhere and we make changes on the fly as often as we need to.

Yet the cultural marching orders we receive firmly command the opposite: Whatever you do, we’re told, don’t quit. And the stories we’re taught in school, from American folklore to Greek mythology, double down on the lesson. Paul Bunyan, anyone? How about John Henry and his hammer? Poor Sisyphus keeps pushing that rock up the hill, even though he knows it’s going to roll right back down again. Every damned time.

Except in the case of consensus bad habits—smoking, using illegal narcotics, drinking alcohol to excess, overindulging in Nutter Butters—quitting isn’t recommended. “Quitter” remains an insult, a mean jeer, a hurtful taunt that never loses its power to wound, even long after we’ve left the playgrounds of middle school. Quitting is granted a unique—and uniquely negative—spot in the pantheon of human behavior. It’s set apart for special vilification. Rarely is it treated as an ordinary maneuver to be routinely deployed when a particular situation simply isn’t working out.

The more I thought about it, the odder all of this seemed. Because for many people, both now and throughout history, quitting has proven to be a savvy strategy, as effective for Homo sapiens as it is for mice and birds. Reluctant as we may be to admit it, quitting works. For a lot of us, our lives improve dramatically when we change direction, when we renounce current behaviors and embrace new ones. Without that willingness to stop and reconnoiter, we’d keep stumbling along in the same direction, even if the trip isn’t taking us where we want to go, even if, in fact, it’s making us downright miserable. Most of us can sense when we’ve reached that point and need to quit. So why don’t we do it more often? And why, given its life-enhancing utility, does quitting have such an unsavory reputation?

To some people, the word “quit” sounds disgustingly weak. But its roots aren’t nearly so negative. Etymology is a murky business, but one of the best guesses is that it comes to us from “quietare,” the Latin verb for “to put to rest,” and it has, like all words, evolved over time, picking up added definitional shadings from other languages and cultures. Dictionary.com provides three meanings: “to stop, cease, or discontinue”; “to depart from; leave”; and “to give up or resign; let go; relinquish.” None of those words or phrases sounds meek to me. They sound decisive. Forward facing. Freeing.

To get to the bottom of the business of quitting, I did what I’ve always done, not just as a journalist but as an incessantly curious (some might say “unrepentantly nosy and borderline annoying”) human being. I put the question to almost everyone I know: What’s the most significant thing you’ve ever quit? And then a follow-up: Do you regret it?

I pestered friends, family members, colleagues, neighbors, strangers in the Starbucks line, fellow dog owners at the dog park. And those people put me in touch with their friends and colleagues and family members, with people who have made all manner of shifts and changes in their lives, despite the cascade of earnest tips that heartily recommends the opposite, the life advice that is drilled into us from birth: Keep on keepin’ on! Winners never quit and quitters never win! Stay the course! Don’t give up! You’re not beaten until you quit!

No one—not one person among the roughly 150 to whom I posed the Quitting Question—ever said, “No, sorry, I can’t think of anything.” Everyone had a Quitting Story. And they all wanted to talk about it. They were eager to join the conversation, demonstrating that the topic of giving up looms large in our lives. We profess to be ashamed of the times we’ve done it—and yet deep inside, we recognize the power of quitting to shake things up, to change us, to help us move forward. I loved hearing tales of how quitting has enabled people to stop what they’re doing and strike out in new directions—sometimes with positive results, and sometimes not, because nothing in life is guaranteed, but always with hope for a better tomorrow. Many of those stories are included in this book.

Along the way, I did a deep dive into what I began to think of as the Curious World of the Quit. I began with the nuances of animal behavior, interviewing neuroscientists and evolutionary biologists and psychologists—the very researchers, that is, who are determined to solve the complex mystery of giving up: What happens in our brains when an action is abandoned? And then I expanded the circle of my inquiry, determined to find out everything about quitting that I could get my hands on, from self-help books to YouTube videos on the sunk-cost fallacy and opportunity cost to articles about the life coach fad and the choice architecture movement—because above all else, quitting is choosing.

Where, I wondered, do we get our convictions about quitting? Why do we avoid it so strenuously, and when we do manage to quit, why do we feel guilty about it?

Truth is, were it not for quitting, we’d have precious little scientific knowledge at all—because the increase of that knowledge requires the constant giving up of concepts that are superseded by new discoveries. Quitting is at the center of intellectual advancement. What if we refused to let go of an idea in the wake of updated information that proves it false? Germs, scherms. Diseases are caused by evil spirits haunting the body. I’ve got a little pain right here—anybody know a good exorcist?

Tim Birkhead, the British scientist whose books have made the world of birds wonderfully accessible, puts it this way: “When scientists retest someone else’s ideas and find that evidence to be consistent with the original notion, then the idea remains. If, however, other researchers… find a better explanation for the facts, scientists can change their idea about what the truth is. Changing your mind in the light of new ideas or better evidence constitutes scientific progress.”

Yet when it comes to our lives and the decisions we make about what to do next, quitting is still frowned upon, still labeled as the last refuge of the loser. Quitting may be marginally more acceptable today than in years past, thanks to a pandemic that made us question the point of joyless jobs and baleful bosses—but it’s still not exactly a career enhancer. You don’t often see “serial quitter” listed as a marketable skill on LinkedIn profiles.

The goal of this book, then, is not only to deliver the latest dispatches from the front lines of the science of giving up, but also to explore just how it is that we got suckered by the idea of grit in the first place. When and why did quitting become synonymous with failure? And in terms of the people who do quit, even in the face of cultural pressure to press on regardless, how were they able to pull it off? Their stories just might help you learn how to block out the hectoring media messages—and the bullying bullet points of too many self-help books—that preach perseverance as a can’t-miss, never-fail strategy.

And while you may ultimately decide not to quit, the decision should be your own and not one based on somebody else’s idea of what constitutes a brave and meaningful life.

So where did it all begin? How’d the idea that grit is virtuous and quitting is sinful ever get its hooks in us?

A major source, of course, is that nettlesome notion known as the Protestant work ethic. “Treating grit as a virtue is a relic of the Protestant Reformation,” says Adam Grant, professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and author of many best-selling books on personal transformation. It’s “part of the American dream,” he tells me.

And not just the American one. Other nations, too, put perseverance on a pedestal. If it weren’t such an entrenched ideal, after all, then the recent mini backlash against it wouldn’t be so newsworthy. As essayist Charlie Tyson observes, “From the ‘lying flat’ movement in China to outcries against deaths from overwork in Japan and South Korea, there is a growing sense of indignation in wealthy countries about inhumane work ideals.” He adds Sweden and Finland to the list of countries who report surprising numbers of workers suffering from job-induced burnout—surprising because for so long, people just didn’t quit, and the positive attributes of superhuman endurance were treated as truisms. Recently, the notion of lying flat took a more vigorous turn: “A new term,” writes historian Rana Mitter, “has been seen on Chinese social media—runxue—the ‘study of run,’ as in ‘running away.’ Young Chinese workers are dispirited by the cocktail of Covid restrictions, highly competitive working environments and social pressures to get married and do well financially.” Quitters, that is, are coming out of the closet. In a buzzed-about 2021 essay in the New York Times, Cassady Rosenblum chronicles her journey from radio producer operating in “the cacophony of the 24-hour news cycle” to serene porch sitter: “Work has become intolerable. Rest is resistance.”

Well, maybe. But it’s not that simple, of course. Because if grit didn’t still have such a powerful hold on our imaginations, we’d not be reading essays by people determined to reject it. “Suddenly talk of grit—being passionate about long-term goals, and showing the stamina to pursue them—seems to be everywhere,” cognitive psychologist Daniel Willlingham wrote in 2016, as the perseverance movement began to gather even more cultural steam. And despite the temporary uptick in workers going AWOL, the traditional lessons of grit still linger: Quit and you’ll fail. Keep your nose to the proverbial grindstone and you’ll reap the rewards—even though it doesn’t always end up that way in real life. Some people toil incessantly and go bankrupt, while others goof off and rake in the dough. Yet we’re still primed to believe in the simple, cause-and-effect power of perseverance.

As you’ll discover in this book, that glorification of grit has a dark side. The campaign against quitting has a checkered past, a complicated and even somewhat sinister history. There’s a reason that quitting is so reviled—and that reason can be tracked down and interrogated. The celebration of perseverance as a surefire source of happiness and satisfaction didn’t just happen; that veneration can be traced back to the place where it emerged from a thick tangle of culture and economics. Our positive attitudes toward grit have been deliberately cultivated. Grit is sold to us like cars and cornflakes and smartphones.

And that’s a shame, because our lives can be transformed in positive ways when we quit, swapping out one destiny for another. If we decide that things need to change, quitting is the first step. (And that’s true as well for the world as a whole. To ensure the planet’s future, we know we must eventually quit fossil fuels and embrace creative and innovative new strategies for energy production.) Until we’re able to stop in our tracks and rethink our lives, we may be stuck in a place where we don’t really want to be.

Maybe you’ve known a few people like that—including yourself.

Perhaps you dealt with it by quitting your job. An unprecedented number of workers in the United States did just that over the past few years, as the pandemic forced us to reexamine our priorities. In the first eight months of 2021, 30 million Americans resigned from their jobs, the highest since the US Department of Labor began keeping track twenty years ago. Barely a week has gone by since 2020 that didn’t feature a news story about someone turning in a company ID and a key card and saying merrily, “So long, suckers!”

The reason we hear those stories, however, is precisely because they’re so unusual. The pandemic gave quitting a brief cachet—the phrase “the Great Resignation” has a high-minded grandeur to it—but let’s face it. The general attitude toward quitting remains what it’s always been: Something to avoid. Something in which only lazy losers indulge, as they snooze in front of a TV screen with a lapful of Cheez-It crumbs. Quitting still carries a stigma, a foul odor. If you quit your church, your yoga class, your political party, your plant-based diet, or your marriage, you’ll still be judged. Quitting something will still provoke a swift reaction from your friends and maybe your mother—maybe especially your mother: “What were you thinking? Did you really give it a fair shot? Did you even try?” We’ve all heard the old saw: Don’t quit a job (or a love affair) until you’ve got another one lined up, ready to go.

We’re still informed on a regular basis—via podcasts and moms—that quitting is proof of a weak character, of a lack of initiative and follow-through. Quitting means you’ll never succeed, never amount to anything. (Many of the people I interviewed for this book were happy to talk about resigning from a job, getting a divorce, or changing course in any one of a dozen different ways, but they bristled at the q word. I didn’t quit, they’d say in a huff. I just left one situation for another, okay? Um, okay.)

Perseverance, by contrast, still sports that sparkling reputation. It’s earnestly praised in the aforesaid podcasts and manifold motivational speeches, in an infinite reel of YouTube lecturettes and an eternity’s worth of TED Talks, the kind that get millions of views. Slogans that extol it are emblazoned on workout gear. Self-help is a robust worldwide business, earning an estimated $11 billion annually. Books that recommend grit are bestsellers, as they declare with gusto that doggedness is good and quitting is bad. Very bad. Your future, these manifestos maintain, is totally in your own hands. If you work hard and follow a rigorous plan—and most of all, if you do not quit—you win. If you give up, though, you fail. Furthermore, you deserve to.

Quitting is presented as an extremity. A last resort. A point of no return. Indulge in it too many times and you’ll be known as a failure, a flake, a wastrel, a spineless wimp—even though it might be exactly what you need to do. The disconnect between quitting’s benefits and its bad reputation can be jarring. It’s no wonder that quitting takes up an enormous amount of space in our psyches—both individually and collectively—and influences how we see ourselves and our world. Quitting may feel right, but it looks wrong.

Even the famous feel the sting.

Scottie Pippen is a champion. Yet despite everything he accomplished in a spectacular seventeen-year career spent mostly with the Chicago Bulls, the former NBA star was tagged once and apparently forever with an odious nickname: “Quittin’ Pippen.” During interviews to promote his 2021 memoir, Unguarded, he was pestered repeatedly about a single incident from almost three decades ago—demonstrating that our umbrage at the idea of quitting apparently has no expiration date.

It happened in game three in the 1994 semifinals of the NBA playoffs. The opponent was the New York Knicks. With 1.8 seconds left in a tied game, Pippen refused to go back on the court after a time-out because Bulls coach Phil Jackson had tapped Toni Kukoc to take the final shot. Miffed at the snub, Pippen sat and sulked. (Kukoc hit the shot to win the game, which probably didn’t help Pippen’s mood.) Pippen has been known henceforth not as the superlative athlete he is but as a quitter.

And even when the world is more sympathetic to a famous athlete’s decision to quit, it still feels entitled to judge. Ash Barty was the number one tennis player in the world when she suddenly gave up the sport in early 2022 at age twenty-five. Columnist Emma Kemp praised the Australian for the gutsy move but noted, “Not a soul outside her inner circle saw this coming.” Barty’s announcement on Instagram had a defensive ring, as if she were getting ready to block shots before they even crossed the net: “I just know that I am absolutely—I am spent—I just know that physically I have nothing more to give.”

A few months earlier, in the “I quit” heard around the world, Simone Biles withdrew from the 2021 Olympics, citing mental health concerns. Granted, many people on Twitter and other platforms professed support for her, but those you-go-girl comments were deployed because so many other people—including Piers Morgan, the acerbic British TV host—snarled the opposite: that by quitting, Biles was being unpatriotic and selfish. She was letting down her country and her team. And squandering her astonishing talent.

We’ll return to Biles and her remarkably courageous move in chapter 1, but for now, let’s focus on how the decision to quit forever alters one’s public image. No matter what happens to Biles or to Barty in the future, it will be the question they face in every interview: Not “How’d you get to be such a great athlete?” but “Why’d you quit?”

Andrew Luck can relate. He left football fans flummoxed—and provoked some less-than-flattering comments in that bloodthirsty arena known as sports talk radio—when he abruptly abandoned a career as a top NFL quarterback in 2019. Before Luck, legendary athletes Sandy Koufax, Barry Sanders, and Björn Borg abandoned their careers long before their skills had diminished to the point where they’d no longer be able to compete. (If you’re a professional athlete, they call it “retirement” even if you’re only twenty-nine, as Luck was when he left.) At their level of fame and accomplishment, giving up is a cataclysmic decision. It means they must remake themselves, top to bottom: “Quitting was an act of imagination and emancipation,” Koufax biographer Jane Leavy wrote of the ace lefty’s decision to walk away from Major League Baseball. “It required the ability to conceive of an existence as full and as important as the one he had so publicly led.”

Greta Garbo is known these days as much for quitting Hollywood in her prime as she is for her acting. Composer Jean Sibelius? He created ravishingly beautiful symphonies and chill-down-your-spine violin concertos—but stopped writing music seriously at sixty-two, three decades before his death. The silence of Dashiell Hammett after publishing The Maltese Falcon and other crime fiction masterpieces is a greater mystery than any he crafted in his work: Why did he put away his pen forever?

When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle said goodbye to Buckingham Palace, relinquishing membership in the British royal family, public outrage was swift and furious: They can’t just quit, can they?