In my mind quitting was always a bad thing. It was a lazy approach. It was the easy thing to do when things were difficult. But the more I travelled the more I realised how wrong I was. I want to tell you why.

Let’s suppose we start learning a new language. We’re so excited that very soon we understand some words and then sentences. In fact, we are now able to speak a bit. We decide we want to have a basic conversation with natives so we keep learning. Progress made and we’re now able to make simple sentences and can understand some key points of the conversation with limited vocabulary. We like it so much that you want to speak and understand well with almost no mistakes. However, we realise we are not learning as fast as before and we’re struggling. We come to the conclusion that it’s not worth the effort.

This is a common human behaviour. We quit when it hurts and I’ve personally done that so many times. But there’s something on the other side of the bridge if we’re truly willing to cross it. There’s a smarter way of quitting.

So there’s a very interesting book I read few years ago in Switzerland explaining some of these concepts but for me there’s really 3 lessons to understand the difference between giving up because it’s easier and giving up because it’s wiser.

Before I forget, I’ve also made a video about this in case you want to check:

Lesson 1: We need to survive a dip before we can achieve our goal

Whatever project we undertake, we’ll be struggling at some point. There will be some challenges hiding behind our initial excitement. Unfortunately, it doesn’t matter how much we plan, there will always be something that we need to face.

When I lived in France, one day I went to a retail store to get some new shoes in Paris. I saw somebody refilling the shelves and I asked that person if I could get some help as I couldn’t find my number. He looked a bit stressed, perhaps my accent was not perfect but he helped me find my number and then we started a little conversation and he was telling me that his full time job was to refill the shelves because he didn’t want to deal with customers.

Right after I left the retail store, I took the metro to come back home and that conversation was still on my mind. I was thinking that if he only had to refill the shelves, he could potentially be easily replaceable. But if he for example could add one just more task such as becoming good at handling difficult customers, this could be precious for the company he worked for.

So I’m saying this because to overcome the dip, I feel like we need to embrace increasingly hard challenges. It’s like running: if we want to run a marathon, then when we train we need to increase our mileage gradually right? Of course, it’s not just that but also a proper diet, sleep, perhaps some supplements to recover and so on. But I make this analogy because our personal development is a muscle. We need to push the limits a bit further.

Emerging from the dip also implies perseverance. These days we want things now. Literally, right now. And this is crazy and I struggle all the time. Because it’s toxic. Let’s say we’re trying to sell a new product and we expect to have a high quality review without even spending money. Or other way round, we have an amazing product and we want results straight away. But the thing is sometimes we might need to spend a very long time in the Dip of getting enough customers.

In school we had to be quite good at many things, in the post-school world it’s better to be excellent at one thing. When looking for an engineer, people don’t care if he or she can also play the piano. They just want them to provide a great service. Specialising is essential for us to withstand the dips we may face in life!

Lesson 2: If we can be the best at something…

When learning languages, at some point we know about something called Zipf’s law. For some reason we over complicate it but essentially it describes that in every language, the most frequent word occurs twice as often as the second most frequent word. Then 3 times as often as the subsequent word and so on until the least frequent word.

Taking this law beyond languages is a good way to understand the difference between being first and second. This means being the very best at what we do will bring us much better results than being second or one of the best. Let’s say I’m an Engineer. Can I be the best in the world? Unlikely. Can I be the best in my country? It depends on many factors but unlikely as well. Can I be the best in the place I work? Probably it can take me few years but it’s not impossible. Can I be the best in my team? Definitely, yes.

My point is that we live in a society that unfortunately likes winners. These days, people don’t want to waste their time and are always looking for the best movies to watch, the best places to eat, the best countries to travel, the best books to read and so on. I definitely disagree with all this but I’m only bringing this because it’s a fact.

So when I travel to a new place and ask locals for a typical restaurant, not always but very often they send me to the most famous one in town. As a result, the majority of tourists are likely to eat in the very same place.

But having many more customers than their competitors isn’t the only advantage of being first. They can also charge higher prices. Because people know they’re worth it because they’re probably the best at what they do. Again, let’s keep it simple. Maybe not the best at every single dish, but they combine the best at one dish with also being at the right time and place. And I think this can be an interesting example for whatever we’re trying to achieve.

Lesson 3: Identifying the right moment to give up is crucial

Seth Godin explains this in a simple way: “Strategic quitting is a conscious decision you make based on the choices that are available to you. If you realise you’re at a dead end compared with what you could be investing in, quitting is not only a reasonable choice, it’s a smart one“.

Sometimes quitting is the wisest thing to do. And the point this book is trying to make is that if we realise we are significantly over investing time and money to be the first in our market, we should consider shifting from our niche to another one. And this doesn’t mean dropping everything we do and change it all. Sometimes it’s just a very small change that we need to make to have different results.

There’s another book called Atomic Habits and James Clear explains this from a different angle but the result is the same. It’s crucial to master the tiny behaviours that lead to remarkable results.

I remember when I lived in Paris I started a business that failed completely because I was investing a lot of time, money and trying to be first in a niche that I was not really good at. At that time, I didn’t see it that way but perhaps I should have changed my niche. The more I think about it, the more I believe that everything happens for a reason even if we’re not able to see it. That temporary defeat was a wake-up a call. Few years later I relocated to London and eventually all things started to fall into place.

Final Thoughts

The truth is that we can’t do everything. Any achievement comes from quitting something to free up time and energy for what we consider more effective. So it’s important to be realistic and work smarter.

I personally failed many times but the ones that I truly succeeded I tried to set goals, deadlines and tolerances to have a framework in terms of when to smart quit or work harder. So if we’re thinking of dropping out of college or to start a new business or any new challenge, I feel like it’s worth understanding more about this whole concept of smart quitting and I found this book was a great starting point.

I’ve also posted another article about quitting here.

Are you thinking of quitting?