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Winners Certainly Do Quit. Here's Why

Forbes Coaches Council
POST WRITTEN BY
Amie Devero

Have you been raised on the mantra “Winners never quit?" Maybe you’re suffering through a role you hate or struggling to embrace the startup slog you thought would be so exciting but is really just thankless. Or, did you decide to learn something new then realize later that you don’t really have any interest or aptitude? Perhaps you’re in a relationship that isn’t quite horrific, but if it were painlessly to disappear, you’d be relieved. Let me offer some unusual advice:

Quit! Give it up. Jump overboard. Wave the white flag, and end the suffering!

Quitting has gotten a bad rap. If you take an inventory of your life and work, there are almost certainly things you do despite taking no delight in them. They may be habits, memberships, television shows you once loved, a job you hate or even a friend who you have long since lost any real commonality with -- yet you carry on, the determined soldier, not wanting to be a quitter. It could be something less trivial: A marriage, job, lifestyle or even the town where you live.

Why are you abiding anything less than a life and work you love?

Think about this. Your life is nothing but a series of moments between birth and death. The number of moments is finite and the end inevitable, although we try to avoid considering that truth. So, every one of the limited moments you spend doing something miserable or tedious just to not quit is a moment you tacitly choose to throw away.

Unless your livelihood, family or life depends on it, most of these moments are being spent on optional activities. And honestly, even your livelihood, family ties and life itself can be changed.

So yes, quit going to the neighborhood party full of helicopter parents and their whiny children. Stop meditating if it’s a chore. And end the crazy keto diet that leaves you hungry and constipated. Last week, I decided to stop eating green peppers when they arrive on a salad. I don’t hate them. I just don’t much like them. Enough.

Recently, a client brought all of this into sharp relief for me. Every year, I assign my executive coaching clients an end-of-year exercise. They write a letter to themselves sent from the future, one year out. The letter from “future self” tells “present self” how the year unfolded and what has been accomplished in that time. One of my founder CTO clients wrote that letter from a future where he worked for someone else.

Let me translate. He envisioned quitting his own company. As a consultant and coach, this was very bad news. Could it be the start of a trend? Would I henceforth be the “black widow coach of founders?" Was an epidemic of ship-jumping startup founders beginning with this client zero?

Thankfully, there was no such trend. Whew. But I took notice of the single instance and admired my client for providing it. The thing that he had recognized while considering how he wanted to look back on the next year of his life was that he was miserable in the role that had formerly been his dream. Spending another year struggling through his distaste for it was appalling when considered through the lens of a backward inspection. He wasn’t willing to have next year’s memory be as fraught and unhappy as his current memory of how he spent the last year.

Many of us won’t even look at our own day-to-day existence through that critical lens. Our lives are populated with artifacts of decisions made in the past, a past in which we imagined how those choices would pan out. But then, we occupy the reality of how they truly turned out. That reality rarely matches the picture we painted in our minds. Sometimes it exceeds our hopes and brings us enormous joy and satisfaction. But just as often, reality turns out bleaker, more tedious, harder or just less fun than we thought. Yet we tolerate it as though the choice itself and the steps along that selected path are irreversible; a sentence we gave ourselves that must be served until its natural end.

Doing what my client did takes courage. The pressure from our culture and upbringing plus that of investors, clients, and even family and friends conspire in a solid background force, insisting on stoic continuation. Nonetheless, walk away he did.

Let me be clear, I am not advocating quitting willy nilly when things get tough or ending relationships at the first sign of trouble. The grit it takes to hang in there to master a skill, accomplish a goal, make a marriage work or bring a startup to full operation is critically important and is a trait worth cultivating and embracing. But who among us has not stayed in a job far too long, tried for decades to save a loveless marriage, or even trudged through a book or movie to the bitter end after having lost interest? Well, stop it. Consider this your quitter’s permission slip. If the book is boring and you don’t care what’s on the next page, stop. There are billions of books to read. Why slog through one you don’t like if you’re not assigned it by your English professor?

Instead, repurpose the KonMari Method from the cupboard and garage to the rest of life. Take inventory of what you’re doing, who you are doing it with, how you spend your time, and perhaps most importantly, what complaints you chronically make to yourself or someone else. Do those activities and people spark joy? Is your life enriched or your brain stimulated? Do you anticipate it with relish? If not, take a clear-eyed look at why you keep it that way. After you complete the assessment, give yourself the option to choose something else, and quit!

Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?