Quitting for Fun and Profit – or – How to Get Everything You Want in One Difficult Step

In October of 2006 I had a what-the-fuck-am-I-doing-here epiphany ten minutes into Mathematics 101. Everyone was focused on the professor who was going down the rows and calling on students to reveal the answers for the previous night’s assignment — basic probability.

Yeah, I know, basic probability. I was 19 years old at the time. I had just finished suffering twelve years of public education and there I was, an adult, relearning basic probability. If-you-flip-a-coin-what-are-the-chances-it-will-land-on-heads basic probability. Not just relearning, though — paying something like $200 per class to relearn it. Did I mention I was an art major?

So, with the class in full motion, I gathered my things, stood up and started walking, all the while trying to ignore the nearly thirty pairs of eyes tracking my journey to the door. I wouldn’t say it felt like an eternity, but it felt a good deal longer than the twenty seconds it must have taken. I felt my classmates’ glares burning into the back of my head and wondered what the professor was thinking of my unexpected departure. My eyes were focused on a smudge just above the doorknob. That’s all I could see and all I wanted to see and I just kept walking… then reaching… then turning… then pulling… then more walking.

After hearing the final click from the latch on the door and finding myself now standing in an empty hallway, I felt relieved and absolutely exhilarated. It marked the first time in my life I had ever stepped against any sort of expectation or fought against a societal current. It was the first day I ever really felt like my own person. I didn’t have a car at the time, but I decided I’d go home anyway. Two and a half miles I walked that day, the sunniest day of my life, feeling freer than I’d ever felt.

I’ve been addicted to quitting ever since.

Winners Always Quit, Quitters Always Win

Most of us have spent our whole lives hearing that work is meant to be a chore, that if you didn’t hate it it wouldn’t be work, that you need to suck it up and just do it because that’s the only way you’ll get anywhere. This, of course, is an outright lie perpetuated by people who are projecting their own insecurities onto you. There are plenty of people who work very hard and get nowhere. Even the ones who are supposedly succeeding will find out that if you aren’t doing what you love, it’s the ultimate failure.

Success is a mixture of hard work and smart work. Not only do you have to put in the sweat and the hours, you also have to have priorities. Having priorities means you have to be able to quit the things that are holding you back. It’s a difficult step, but completely necessary to true success.

When I was in high school I worked at a billing department. Each day I was greeted to several large foam post office buckets filled with insurance forms and each day I had to separate each of the forms by type then company then date and finally by the applicant’s name. I got really good at it, too. I knew the fastest way to get to the folders, the fastest method of sorting, the most efficient way to read names. I had become an insurance-form-sorting expert. By the end of the day, there wasn’t a single bucket with a single page left to be sorted!

Until the next day. When I returned there were several more buckets filled with hundreds (if not thousands) of new forms to be sorted. I worked hard and I worked efficiently, but efficiency is not the same as effectiveness. My goals were to travel the world, make enough money, create art, write. How was sorting insurance forms going to help me attain that? It wasn’t.

It’s very easy to efficiently suck at life.

Knowing When To Quit

When a project hasn’t been fun for an extended period of time, like two to three months, and you can’t see yourself being there next week let alone next year… quit. It’s as simple as that. However, you need to realize that things won’t always be fun. You’ll definitely hit slumps, but many slumps will take care of themselves within a month or two. You’ll be able to push through and things will be better than ever. Experience will teach you which is which.

It might sound like common sense, but I believe it’s also important to note that if you have bad feelings about a project or hate it before it gets started or just as it gets started, there’s a very good chance you’ll always hate it. Quit. Quit before it starts and don’t look back. There’s no reason to suffer through something because you think you’ll like it eventually. That’s like marrying someone because you expect them to change. It’s a very stupid move.

Conclusion

Reflect on your life, think about what you’re doing. Is it effective? Do you hate it? Make sure you are on track to be where you want to be tomorrow or a month from now or next year. Don’t keep wasting your time on projects you’ve been told to put up with.

Life is much too short for that.