Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (2 page)

 

Chapter One

The Psychology of Persistence

It's probably important at the outset to admit that both of us have quit major career paths. Strangely enough, we quit the same career path, though we each ended up in very different places and left for different reasons. In addition to Alan's years of work as a psychotherapist, our career changes give us an insider's view of what it means to quit, in terms of both the cost and the possibility.

A Tale of Two Quitters

Alan was in his late twenties, married and a father, and in graduate school on a track to earn a Ph.D. in literature. Having passed his oral exams, he was writing his thesis and was within sight of the goal: a Ph.D. and a position as a university professor. But while he liked teaching (and disliked research), he also realized that he was less interested in teaching Shakespeare's sonnets to his students than he was in listening to them talk about themselves, their goals, and their aspirations, which he had ample opportunity to do in a relaxed university setting in which students actually dropped in on, and spent time with, their teachers. The details of what Alan really loved to do emerged from these interactions at a time when he too was finding himself. He knew that he had a passion for his students as people and wanted to help them make positive choices in life
more than he wanted to teach them about iambic pentameter. His calling wasn't literature but psychotherapy. He actually quit in the middle of his thesis.

Still, the transition from the prestige of a doctorate and a connection to a highly regarded academic institution to earning a master's degree in social work was hardly smooth at the time, in the early 1970s. It was accompanied by big doses of self-doubt and worry, something Alan remembers well even after many years of an immensely satisfying career: “Transition isn't from dark to light but more likely a process fraught with both hope and doubt, the two slugging it out through fifteen rounds.”

What did quitting accomplish for him? It propelled him into finding and articulating a life's work that was truly satisfying and meaningful, helping people make the most important choices of their lives.

Peg, too, quit academia at a time when jobs were few and far between, and went into the world of publishing. She was on track to finish her dissertation, which was all that stood between her and a Ph.D. in literature, but the politics of academia made her feel that she had better things to do, much to the chagrin of her advisors. But to her surprise, corporate life was in some ways reminiscent of academia, and in her thirties, she decided she wanted to work for herself and set her own goals. In time, she became a writer, which has proved satisfying and permitted her to be a full-time mother while having a career—which she thinks is nothing short of a godsend.

Both of us understand not just the incredible leap of faith that quitting a long-held goal or dream entails, but also the doubt and worry that accompanies the first moment of free fall.

Why
Quitter
Is a Dirty Word

The kind of quitting we're talking about isn't what the word
quitter
brings to mind. As a corollary to the belief in persistence and the American Dream,
quitter
is one of the strongest epithets you can
toss at someone. It connotes a deep-seated character flaw, an inability to commit to a course, and weakness in the face of challenge.

Look up
quitter
in the dictionary, and you'll read “one who quits, especially one who gives up too easily.” The moral judgment is right there, up close and personal.

True goal disengagement isn't easily accomplished. It involves freeing the mind from its previous engagement, managing negative emotions, creating a new goal, and changing your behavior to line up with the new goal you've set. In contrast, the act of someone we call a quitter is decidedly different.

Take the case of Jason, thirty-two, who took six years to finish high school (his parents sent him to prep school for two extra years so he'd achieve more) and then six to finish college (after getting thrown out of the first prestigious college because he didn't do the work). His modus operandi throughout his twenties and thirties has been marked by quitting jobs, relationships, and even cities. He went to Spain to teach, although his goal wasn't teaching; he was just filling time. He moved to the West Coast to reinvent himself, quit that, and moved back east.

As he tells it, no job has ever been stimulating enough or worthy of his talents and abilities. He's always underappreciated. That's why he has never stayed at one job for longer than a year. He's still not sure what career path would work for him, and he doesn't seem to mind not knowing. He always quits an endeavor before he actually has to perform, which pretty much keeps him from ever failing—which may well be the point.

We've all met a Jason or two along the way, or a Jill, for that matter. He's the one who packs up when the hours get long, when the work gets tedious, or when he finds that he's in danger of failing. Collectively, we dislike a quitter because when we work as colleagues or teammates, he's the most likely to leave us holding the bag and we'll end up doing the work he was supposed to do.

What makes someone a quitter? It turns out there are lots of reasons. Quitters may not be able to commit. They may be afraid of success or afraid of failure. They may be hopelessly mired in
self-defeating behaviors. They may be lazy or slackers or coasters on the lake of life.

This kind of quitting is equally based in avoidance and the inability to engage; it has nothing to do with the thoughtful kind of quitting we're talking about.

Before we turn to the right kind of quitting, let's look at how our reliance on persistence alone further skews our emotions and how we think about letting go.

The Emotional Push to Persist

Given the cultural and internal pressure to persist,
it's pretty hard to overstate
how emotionally charged the act of quitting actually is. On the simplest level, there's the problem of proving that you're not a quitter in conventional terms—the person who reacted emotionally, who didn't have the gumption to hang in there, who lacked the inner resources to see a situation through to the end, the one weakling in the pack. That's a lot to take on, and a pretty good incentive to keep on going.

As a group, we see quitting as proactive only when it involves giving up a bad habit. The rest of the time, quitting is viewed as reactive, and not a very good reaction at that. For those reasons, anyone who even contemplates quitting is going to find himself or herself in a fair amount of emotional turmoil, not to mention a defensive crouch. The cultural context demands that we justify the act of quitting, both publicly and personally, which involves taking on a boatload of emotional baggage. It shouldn't be a surprise that's one way we're emotionally encouraged to persist.

There's an equally important reason we shy away from quitting. By and large, human beings are more avoidant than not, especially when it comes to emotional or physical pain. When people are stuck in a toxic or stressful situation—it could be in the realm of career or relationship—they're much more likely to continue coping with the
emotional pain they know than to take on the emotional turmoil they don't, the terra incognita they'll have to explore if they decide to quit and leave. Therapists' offices are filled with people who are stuck in this way, choosing to persist in situations that make them actively unhappy but that are known to them. Moreover, persisting won't involve any of the feelings of shame, powerlessness, or failure we broadly associate with the wrong kind of quitting.

Because staying the course is seen as a virtue, there's a certain amount of emotional equanimity associated with it, and none of the upheaval that is part of letting go. This, too, gives an emotional boost to persistence.

While the kind of quitting this book advocates and explains is decidedly different, it too has an emotional quotient. Artful quitting, by definition, involves letting go of the familiar, staking out new territory, living through a period of ambiguity, and dealing with the emotional fallout of letting go of something important. By definition, this is all difficult emotional terrain to navigate, but in the end, it promises greater emotional rewards. Managing your emotions is an important part not just of artful quitting but of the process of resetting new goals. The emphasis on persistence—keeping us in place—paradoxically doesn't teach us to manage our emotions but to contain them. In that sense, mastering the art of quitting involves an emotional education as well. As one woman, now in her sixties, who has had four separate career paths during her lifetime says, “Quitting takes courage; deciding to take the chance isn't always easy. Something I like about myself is that I manage to find that courage and then go ahead and make the leap anyway, even when I don't know where I will land. A tremendous amount of trust is involved when you risk going off into the wild unknown and assume that this will probably turn out just fine.”

In the end, though, it's neither our mere avoidance of the emotional cost of quitting nor the cultural shame of letting go of a long-term goal that keeps us persisting. It's also about how our minds are geared to persist.

The Brain and Persistence

What makes artful quitting difficult is, in part, a consequence of how our brain processes the information it's given by our senses. Both the cultural pressure to persist and the workings of the brain collude in ways that keep many of us in hot pursuit of goals that aren't attainable in the end.

We pursue our goals believing that the process is orderly, logical, and conscious, but in reality, our brains function using strategies that can be valuable if the goal is easily reached and, equally, detrimental if the goal is unattainable. Scientists have delineated two overlapping systems of thought, or cognition.
One, called
intuition
, is fast and relatively effortless. It works by association and is often emotionally laden. The other system depends on reasoning; it's much slower, deliberate, and conscious. Since a human being's overall capacity for mental processing is limited, the more effortful thinking processes tend to interrupt each other. In contrast, the intuitive kind of thinking proceeds without interruption when combined with other tasks. As a result, when we think about more than one thing at once, the easy answer—the one offered up by the intuitive system—is the most likely to come to mind. Of course, we're not aware that this is happening, and we tend to ascribe reasoning and deliberateness to all of our thoughts.

Intuitive thinking was once extremely useful to human beings, most usually in contexts that involved physical pursuits like hunting or physical prowess, when both quick response and sheer persistence were necessary to survival. In the twenty-first century, our minds still employ these strategies, which have nothing to do with logic or reason.

The ways in which most people react to a hard-to-reach goal is universal enough that the various ways have actually been named and studied by researchers. In some cases, we've renamed them for clarity but we give the scientific terms as well. These are all common habits of mind we need to recognize and understand because they get to the heart of why persistence needs to be tempered by the
ability to quit. All of these innate behaviors are nourished by our cultural myths and the injunctions against quitting.

The story of Jennifer is a case in point. Jennifer is thirty-two, the daughter of an attorney, and now an associate in a small but prestigious law firm. She'd set becoming a lawyer as her goal in college, and she'd been a gifted and dedicated student in law school. She brought the same committed energy to her work, and for the first four years, she'd loved practicing law, despite the long hours she put in. Then her immediate superior left to join another firm.

Her new boss was something else. Even though her clients and the other members of the law firm seemed to like her, he was extremely critical of her and her work. But, in the hierarchy of the firm, his evaluation of her mattered.

She adopted new ways to please him, and from time to time, she was encouraged by his response. At those moments, she could reassure herself that she was on the verge of winning him over. But in the end, nothing she did was good enough for him.

Over time, she began to dread going to work. Whatever pleasure she'd derived from her practice was fast fading. She was anxious and depressed and had no idea what to do. Everyone she spoke to—her husband, her parents, her friends—counseled her to hang in.

She had too much time and effort invested to quit—three years of law school and almost four at the firm. She still had a shot at making partner and was hopeful she could win her boss over eventually. If she quit, the boss would win. In a bad economy, with more lawyers than there were jobs, she might never get work as an attorney again. Quitting would make her look bad, as though she couldn't handle pressure. A bad reference from her boss might dog her for years. If she hung in, she'd have more control over what would happen next than if she simply bailed.

Jennifer's story isn't unusual. You can substitute the particulars in her story for others—change her profession, her goal, the bad boss scenario, etc.—and you'll still have the kind of quandary our singular reliance on tenacity creates. It could easily be a story of a relationship or even a marriage where the dilemma is to stay or to
leave, and both the voice in our head and the chorus outside are telling us to hang on.

As we'll see, in the face of obstacles to a goal, we may believe that we are reacting consciously and rationally but something else is actually going on.

Seeing the Near Win

Fed by the myth of persistence, when people fall just shy of achieving their goal, they're much more likely to see it as a near win than a loss or a failure. There's a reason for that.