Notes on Quitting

Persistence is overrated because it is easy to praise. Quitting is underrated because it is hard to distinguish from failure, even from the inside.

The useful question is not whether you are giving up too easily. Almost no one gives up too easily on the things that matter to them. The useful question is whether you are still learning. Projects have a learning curve and then a plateau, and the plateau feels almost exactly like the curve while you are on it. The difference is that on the plateau, the mistakes stop being new.

When your mistakes start repeating, you are no longer working. You are maintaining.

The other signal is what happens on a free Saturday. If the thing you would do with an unclaimed day is not the thing you have committed your years to, that is data. Not a verdict, but data. People are honest with their spare time in a way they rarely are with their stated goals.

Quitting well is a skill in itself. Done badly, it is a sudden collapse followed by a story about how the world was unfair. Done well, it looks like an orderly handoff: you finish the piece that is nearly done, you write down what you learned, and you leave without a speech.

Most of the good work I have seen came from people who had quit several things cleanly before. The willingness to stop is what makes the willingness to start affordable.