The Power of Giving Up
For many good reasons, we’ve come to associate excellence, virtue, and reliability with sticking it out at any cost. An entire industry has been created around cheerleading people to take things to the next level, push past comfort zones, beat resistance, and triumph over adversity. And yet this glorification of grit has eclipsed an equally powerful capacity––quitting.
Sure, quitting can sometimes be an act of cowardice. It can blow things up; it can sabotage our best efforts and highest aspirations; it can burn bridges or create real messes. But it can also be an act of bravery; it can save our life.
Almost anyone you ask has a bold and brave Quitting Story. And if you ask them to tell you about it, you’ll watch their eyes light up, their speech quicken, and they’ll pull you into a compelling tale of courage, risk, and adventure. I have several myself and every one of them was life-saving.
Here’s one:
I was a year out of college as a marketing major. An ambitious university student, I worked double-time during my junior and senior years as an intern for the former Director of Marketing for Neiman-Marcus in her new position launching a high-profile property in Dallas, Texas. She was an outstanding mentor and deliberately exposed me to all the right professional circles. Numerous powerful career opportunities were presented to me at a––let’s say, way too young––age. I was headhunted by everything from leading national advertising firms to newspapers. But it was the allure of working in the radio business that enticed me away from a secure and experience-appropriate ongoing position with my mentor.
I took a position as Director of Marketing (yeah, at 23…do you hear the looming cautionary music?) at a top-ranking radio station at the time, working under the newly minted Program Director––one of the former founding fathers of MTV. To my immature mind, I had made it. I was in the thick of the music industry and living the high life complete with a private high-rise office with a view of downtown. Rock stars swanned down the hallways. We all drove cool cars.
I certainly didn’t have the maturity or experience to handle such a role, nor the thick skin to deal with the vainglorious personalities that permeated the industry. Everything was hectic and frankly––maniacal. Sometimes while working deep into the early morning hours, I’d walk past the dusty remnants of lines of cocaine on desktops. I was Dorothy in some crazy insane Oz. My boss, a New Yorker who had vastly underestimated the vicious competitive scene of ‘silly small-time Dallas market’ became increasingly stressed and brutal.
I was becoming sick. Ulcers were populating my stomach like rabbits. My hair started to fall out. I never saw my friends. Depression was setting in. But I kept pushing on, attempting each day to meet my boss’s increasingly impossible expectations. The game had become unwinnable. One late night while no one was in the office, I sat at my desk, staring blankly out over the skyline. I totally lost it. I sobbed for hours not understanding that I had all the power in my own hands. I could quit. Of course, quitting seemed like professional suicide. I catastrophized the consequences. I was sure it was the absolute worst choice I could make. Shouldn’t I just keep trying harder?
“By doing nothing, we change nothing. And by changing nothing we hang on to what we understand, even if it is the bars of our own jail,” wrote John le Carré in The Russia House. I thought I was doing something by trying harder and harder, but in fact, I was on a rat wheel going nowhere, and in effect doing nothing.
So I picked up the phone and called a friend. And he said to me, “You have no idea what awaits you when you let go of a toxic situation.” I don’t know why those words helped me. I think because they opened the door to possibility. And so that night I wrote my resignation letter. Within a month I moved back to my hometown of Santa Fe to heal and started my own business a year and a half later.
“Contrary to popular belief, quitting will get you to where you want to go, faster,” writes Annie Duke in her book Quit - the Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. That was certainly my experience after leaving the radio station. But I couldn’t have known that the night I resigned. In this way quitting requires a kind of faith in the unknown that only reveals itself much later.
Why is it that letting go, quitting, walking away, throwing in the sponge, packing it up, folding the cards, flying the coop, skipping out, and giving up, are synonymous with failure? Probably because entire cultural narratives throughout history are built upon the heroic myth of the pioneer who crosses great expanses of ocean, land, and space to arrive at a final destination. Institutions then build on that narrative to push for more, harder, and better. The pervasive message is that grit is a virtue and quitting is a vice.
Popular culture deifies those who have the can-do spirit, who is gutsy, ballsy, never give up, and are tenacious in the face of failure. All this is ok except that in doing so we then dehumanize those who take the equally courageous move of giving up.
The world watched aghast when Prince Harry and Megan Markle quit the Royal Family. “They can’t just quit!”, screeched the tabloids. They did. The intense polarization that erupted from their departure––from outcry (even death threats) to almost wildly unhinged celebration is because of our own ambivalence of, shame around, and wish for the ability to quit something in our own lives.
But tenacity and surrender are two sides of a complimentary pair that work together in concert and when applied skillfully help to support our success. We must know when to persist, and when to let go. And this requires enormous self-awareness…and awareness of your circumstances:
I am a backpacker and avid hiker. I love hiking beyond the tree line and to the tops of 13,000 –14,000-foot mountains. It’s such a total high for me. Nothing teaches more about the complimentary pair of grit and quit than scaling mountains. Reaching a summit, requires more tenacity than you can imagine, especially when carrying a weighted pack. But to survive you must know when to quit. During the summer months, the monsoon clouds build up, and terrible lightning storms arrive. You’re nearly there, you’ve planned all year to be atop this mountain. Those who persist onwards in such conditions never return home alive.
In Quitting: A Life Strategy: The Myth of Perseverance―and How the New Science of Giving Up Can Set You Free Julia Keller writes, “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.”
Giving up takes courage. It demands letting go of your ego, your shame, your plans, and your ideas of the future. It means letting go of who you think you are, or who you think you should be. I believe it’s a spiritual move because you must let go of all that you know and understand and lean into the ultimate vulnerability––nothingness.
While it is often a counter-intuitive and scary move, it’s important to remember that quitting is also one of the most natural, evolutionarily intelligent things you can do. In nature, we see organisms toss in the towel all the time. One of nature’s principles is to conserve energy and never expend it unwisely. Finches on Galapagos islands will use their specially shaped beaks to break open the hard case of a seed. But if a seed case is particularly hard, they’ll move on. Slime molds rely on exploratory networks of tentacle-like veins that help them to ‘decide’ by stopping, and going in another direction. Nature knows when the expenditure of energy starts to erode survival. So there’s a high cost to our Sisyphean habit to persevere into infinity.
Not only is it necessary to spot the need to quit, but also to know when to give up. You pay a huge price for waiting too late to quit––opportunities lost, health diminished, relationships eroded, self-respect shrunken, even death.
We can take heart in knowing our lives can be transformed by quitting. On the other side of most Quitting Stories are tales of remarkable possibility, doors opening, miracles, and new horizons.
Here are some ways you can quit:
Quit a job
Abandon a project
Give up on a toxic or underperforming person
Delegate something that is just not working for you
Surrender expectations
Fold in an argument
End a bad marriage
Fire a client
Turn around on a hike when it gets too hard (or dangerous)
Let go of your involvement in a loved one’s addiction
Willingly lose a game
Turn around when you are lost
If you are a serial ‘non-quitter’, I encourage you to bring the art of quitting as a noble addition to the arrows in the quiver of your mastery. You can’t know that by quitting everything will work out great; it may not. But at least you are in charge of your self; you are claiming your self-agency and taking an important step in determining your own life’s direction. And who knows what wonderful opportunity awaits you on the other side?
