I wish people quit things more.
Of all the things that I can credit, recommend or advise on when it comes to finding work you enjoy doing & then designing your life around that.
My #1 will always be - Quit early. Quit often.
I feel happy about having spent only a few years of my working life doing work I didn’t enjoy. The majority of my life will be spent doing work that lights me up.
Why?
Because I quit things a lot.
I know our society has created a negative narrative around quitting. But if you’ve ever met someone who’s stayed in a job, relationship, or degree for longer than they should have. You’ll understand true negativity.
A few weeks ago, I was considering quitting freelancing because I was so burnt out after a year (spoiler, I didn’t need to quit, I just needed boundaries)
But the only recurring thought I had during that time was “But everything I worked for in the past year would be wasted If I quit now right?”
And that’s our problem. Sunk cost fallacy.
“The Sunk Cost Fallacy describes our tendency to follow through on an endeavor if we have already invested time, effort, or money into it, whether or not the current costs outweigh the benefits.”
“I got a degree in this, so I at least have to work a few years in the field, I worked so hard to set myself up for a promotion, how can I quit now? I moved cities for this job, I would be a fool to give it up”
Quitting is never an easy decision for anyone & when I’ve made big decisions in the past such as quitting a job at Goldman Sachs 7 months into it, changing fields from finance to working in education or deciding to become self-employed, it definitely didn’t happen in a day.
But the main reason I believe I’ve been able to get in & get out quickly when I knew something wasn’t for me is because I never viewed life as 1 never-ending block of time.
But more as chunks or phases of time.
Some chunks are as big as years at a time. Some are as small as months.
Each chunk has its own theme, rules, objective & identity.
One can be about making money, one about being creative, one about finding community, and one about receiving validation.
And the most important part, ‘what you do within one does not carry forward into another.’ For example, let’s say at this point, I were to quit freelancing. Does that mean everything I worked towards for the past year IS A WASTE?
That’s ridiculous.
Is the time I had available because of being self-employed which then allowed me to be super hands-on with my wedding planning completely gone?
Is the money I made by being able to rapidly scale my income in order to self-fund my wedding NOT REAL just because I don’t work with those clients anymore?
Do the courses that I worked on DISAPPEAR once I take a break?
Continuing to do something you don’t enjoy is the worst. But quitting late is still up there.
Most of the default narratives have us believing that the consequences of fresh starts are way worse than they actually are.
We’ve also put some limit on how many times one can quit. Like once you quit something, the next thing you do has to THE ONE. Only then was it justified.
I have started from scratch in a really big way at least 3 times in the past decade. Each time it has led to an exponential improvement in my career path. If I had not continued to regularly blow up my life, I would be at point 5 of whatever journey I’m currently on. But now I’m probably at point 28. That’s how much I’ve been able to expedite being able to do what I want to do - by quitting & starting over.
“We are much more bothered by the downside potential of changing course than we are by the downside potential of staying on the path we’re already on.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away
Doing 1 thing for a really long time is one of the options.
Having like a really long ‘experience’ section on LinkedIn that shows all the different things & placed you’ve worked at is really cool too.
Don’t be afraid to follow your first thought. The thought you have before you convince yourself that you’re making the wrong choice.
(I wish to acknowledge that I don’t believe anything I have said here is new information. But I do believe it’s permission. Unfortunately, we feel we need tons of permission before we quit something. So, this is another drop in your permission bucket.)
If you’re contemplating quitting something, reply to this & let me know! Maybe I’ve quit the same thing too in the past, which could make you feel better.
"Is the time I had available because of being self-employed which then allowed me to be super hands-on with my wedding planning completely gone?
Is the money I made by being able to rapidly scale my income in order to self-fund my wedding NOT REAL just because I don’t work with those clients anymore?
Do the courses that I worked on DISAPPEAR once I take a break?"
These three questions have made me realise the typical approach to quitting assumes there's only a handful of useful ways to leverage our past experience or expertise, viz. in a future job that pays out further dividends on the cost expended. But there's non tangible dividends to any experience or expertise we gain in life, is the point you make -- as I understand it -- and it's really up to us to find them and leverage them. So what I'm walking away with is that every experience/expertise we acquire is an investment in ourselves, not a cost expended on ourselves.