This blog post is a quick summary of the book “Quitting: A life strategy”, written by Julia Keller

Context

Bought this book impulsively from Kinukoniya@SG and glad I did it. The title is a give away about the core message from the book - quitting is a life hack. Does the book deserve a book length treatment ? That was my initial thought and was reluctant to spend a few hours on the book. However once I started reading, I got hooked on to various arguments that the author makes around the core message.

The author starts off with her own story when she decided to quit grad school. The drama and self-resistance that preceded her decision is the springboard upon which this book has evolved. The fact that we associate quitting with something negative runs deep. It is a combination of multiple factors and the book goes in to describing some of the factors. In doing so, the author is not advocating the readers to quit right away whatever they are doing; instead the author wants to soften the reaction to quitting and make the option of quitting more reasonable, more rational, more sensible in situations that we might subconsciously or consciously resist quitting

If you spent a few minutes in thinking about why you might not quit something that you are already doing, it is not difficult to see that some of the reasons could be

• You have already invested time and effort in it. May be you should stick to the activity even though it does not give you the expected outcome in the form and shape that you desire
• You are worried about what others will think, once you quit and fail
• World has drilled the importance of grit and persistence in our psyche. May be what is needed is more grit and resilience. May be you are weak and you should seek some guidance to develop grit
• Quitting and going on a different path is fraught with uncertainty. May be your whole world will become Topsy-turvy
• May be you are short-sighted and you need to give yourself and pursue rather than quit
• In the explore-vs-exploit pattern of thinking, quitting means that you are forever exploring and you are not sticking to something that will enable you to exploit
• Quitting might make you feel that you are a loser

What Bird, Bees and Gymnasts can teach us about giving up

The author cites several examples from the nature that highlight the importance of quitting as quintessential for survival. Some of the examples mentioned are

• A persevering finch is a doomed finch. If birds spend too long pecking away at a caltrop with an especially tough hide, they are in big trouble. The finches that know when to give up and move on to another potential food source have a better chance of survival because they are not depleting themselves in a quest with diminishing nutritional returns.
• For a honeybee, the drive to survive carries within its the commitment to make sure there will be more honeybees. And so she defends her colony with reckless abandon. When a honeybee stings a potential predator, she dies, because the sting eviscerates her. Honeybees make a calculation on the fly. They decide if a predator is close enough to the colony to be a legitimate threat and, further, if the colony has enough reproductive potential at the point to warrant her ultimate sacrifice. If the moment meets those criteria - genuine peril, fertile colony - the honeybees are fierce fighters, happy to perish for the greater good

The point of the above and many more examples is to show quitting in a positive light. You quit - so that you’ll have the time and the energy to go after something else. Something more promising. Quitting is a survival strategy.Birds, worms, insects instinctively quit for prioritizing benefits(survival) over style.

In a way, Quitting means stopping one and starting something else. Quitting fundamentally means you are able to do something else. Despite this obvious outcome of quitting, we humans, still see quitting in a bad light.

The Neuroscience of - Nope - I am done

The author gives a glimpse of various neuroscience research done by scientists in understanding what happens in our brain when we quit. The chapter talks about experiments done on zebra fish that naturally swim against the tide. By creating artificial conditions that make zebra fish quit, several scientists have found out that there is a particular type of glial cell that gets activated when zebra fish quits. Does there exist similar cells or mechanisms in human body ? Research is still on, in this area. Some of the developments so far indicate that there are certain neurons that suppress dopamine activity that are usually the triggers for our motivation levels. However nothing is conclusive yet. If ever, there is even a hint of breakthrough in this area, that might give rise to significant developments in the area of medicine, therapy and many other related fields that are all grappling with “Quitting” in various forms

Jennifer Aniston Quits her job

The author talks about the various quitting scenes in the movies that have captured the imagination of all of us. In a way, these scenes appeal to many, who might want to dramatically quit on something they are caught in to. I am sure every one thinks has a few favorite scenes from the barrage of media scenes one is exposed, and fantasizes that he/she was the protagonist in the scene. More often, the scenes in art such as opera, movies, theater show “Stickitivity” as a way to success. The protagonists keep doing one thing against all odds and succeed. However in real life, it is usually the opposite. We have to quit something in order to begin something new.

Peddling Perseverance

The author traces our current fix on perseverance, grit to a few personalities whose books have permeated popular culture for years. Samuel Smiles from mid 10th century, Norman Vincent Peale, Napoleon Hill have through their books, celebrated the notion that it is our thoughts that influence the outcome and it is only through staying the course, persevering through hardships does once succeed. Very appealing notion until it meets the reality of life, where failure is everywhere. It is unavoidable. How do you handle failure is the key ? Start again, fail again, Start again, fail again seems to be mantra of most of successful entrepreneurs. However do a random search on personal improvement will yield in hits that mostly talk about grit and perseverance and less about being flexible enough to quit often

Luck and Letting Go

The author points out several anecdotal evidence of people who have quit and found it liberating. Things around us are always uncertain. We do not get to decide many external events that shape our lives. All we can do is to, when situation arises, quit and try something new

A large portion of our lives is beyond our control. We have no say over where we’re born, or to whom, or, on so many occasions, which events happen to us and when. The late Justus Rosenberg, who risked his life to work with the French resistance during World War II, once told an interviewer, “There are no geniuses, really, only what people make with what they are given—that, and a confluence of circumstances.”

Making a Better World

The author makes a point that we often tend to attribute the broad inequalities in standard of living to individual choices that people make. By making the individual the focus of attention, our culture moves away from analyzing the systems, the governing bodies, the larger components of a system that lie outside the individual’s influence, that are the real causes of many afflictions of the world.

Self-improvement culture is disembodied. It’s a disavowal of our physical vulnerability. One is always supposed to be overcoming one’s bodily insufficiency.” Self-help pushes “the idea of boundless capacity, with no chinks in the armor.” But the Covid-19 virus reminded us all of what people who deal with a disability—their own or that of a loved one—have known all along: no one is exempt from the stark lottery of illness. “People fall,” McGee declares. “They have to spend a year in bed. Or they have a child with a developmental disability. We need to do what self-help doesn’t do—to deal with the body in its frailty, not its capacity. The mind in its feebleness, not its robustness.

Giving up - How to Guide

The rest of the chapters contains hacks suggested by the author to aid quitting

• Precision quitting is one where you start looking at quitting as not a binary event but more like a dial. It gives you joy and liberation, instead of shame and guit. You can quit the activity you are doing and then do something in a related field. You are doing a “pivot” is what the modern jargon says
  • Darwin’s example where he stopped his experimentation, acknowledged that another person has published similar findings, pivoted to being a writer
  • Many serial entrepreneurs do this
• Avoid sunk-cost fallacy that accompanies any quitting decision
  • Unless one quits, one does not get another chance of winning
• Quitting might make you feel guilty as you might be disappointing others. It is up to choose whether you want to disappoint yourself
• Always think quit to what and start making transition plans before you actually quit

Takeaway

We are often afraid to try new things, for many reasons. Trying out necessitates quitting the current line of thinking and action. The bigger the decision, the more likely we are gripped with fear and sunk-cost fallacy. The book is a fantastic reminder of the importance of “quitting” in one’s life as a survival strategy; survival here might not be a dramatic life and death situation, but more mundane life situations where we need to deemphasize grit and give the deserved recognition to quitting. Be it learning a hard mathematical theory, delivering a project, mastering an instrument: quitting mindset hacks mentioned in this book , if followed, might increase your odds of success. Fascinating to know about various species in the world, that intuitively follow quitting and survive. Humans for various reasons are see “quitting” in a positive light and books such as these are very useful to make us think differently.