Why The Quitter Always Wins

Posted by Jeff Carter
on July 3rd, 2012

This week, I am way up north in Grand Marais, MN. I have very limited access to internet and cell technology. It occassionally works way in the woods where I am hanging out. I try to post photos on Instagram or Facebook.

Robbie Abed has guest blogged here before. Robbie is the founder of rawdesignr. You can find him on twitter & his personal blog. Robbie is also actively involved as the CTO for Technori.

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Quitting doesn’t mean what you think it means. Quitting get’s a bad rap. Let me explain why.

Quitting Isn’t What You Think It Is.

The standard webster definition does a great job of explaining exactly what quitting is, but falls short on explaining the deep emotion of quitting (not like it’s supposed to cover it, but you get the point!)

To me, quitting is accepting the fact that you failed and recognizing that you need to make a change.

Quitting means accepting that the career you spent 7 years building, isn’t really what you wanted to do for a living. It doesn’t mean that the past 7 years of your life was worthless, it just means that you are failing now, and you need to make a change now.

Quitting also doesn’t necessarily have to be part of a life changing event. People associate quitting with something like “I quit my job to pursue a life long passion, with only $5,000 in the bank.” Yes, that person is a quitter, but that’s an extreme example.

That person could have easily said: “I quit going out after work and started working on my passion project.”

Quitting is hard, but it doesn’t have to be.

The Quitter Always Wins

Failure means that you have to quit doing what you’ve been doing and do something different. Doing something different is an amazing thing. It allows you to really think deep at what you’re currently doing and how the next step is going to be better than before.

I quit my job ~~6 months ago~~, wow 7 months ago. I only “quit” once, but in the 7 months I’ve actually quit 3 or 4 times. Every assumption I made about my new business was wrong. Initially, I didn’t want to accept that what I was doing wasn’t going to work out. But, I had no choice but to quit AKA “pivot”. I had to do try something else. If I didn’t quit, I would be stuck in the same place I was 7 months ago. Every day I’m learning, and every day I’m quitting. I always think to myself “If I had to do this from scratch, how would I do it”.

Quitting is the best thing to ever happen to me. It’s the only way to find out that my assumptions were incorrect.

Robbie, It’s Not That Easy

I know, I know – It’s not that easy. You can’t just quit your job because you have a family to feed. You can’t quit smoking because what else are you going to do when you need a 10 minute break? You can’t just stop programming in PHP even though you know Ruby on Rails is the superior language. You already invested so much time in it already. There are so many things in your way to prevent you from quitting. It’s human nature.

I understand, it’s not that easy as I make it out to be. Quit in increments. Quit small things one at a time. Accept failure. Accept that you have to make a change. Get rid of all that baggage. Start from scratch.

Just remember, Fail Fast. Quit Faster.

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