We Should Stop Telling Quitters They Never Win

“Quitters never win and winners never quit.”

While that phrase has been ingrained in my brain since pre-school, I’ve been a quitter for as long as I can remember.

In the sixth grade, after a mere three weeks of playing the clarinet, I stopped practicing at home. I grew tired of being unable to keep up with the pace of the music. I had no momentum on the reed. One week later, I quit the school band.

In high school, I walked into the first day of track practice to try out for the long-distance team. Our task was to do a simple three mile jog. I finished a mile and a half and collapsed. That was the last day of my long-distance track career.

In the summer between freshman and sophomore year of college, I began working as a door-to-door sales job for Verizon. I was required to wear a suit and sell to a bunch of beach homes in Gloucester. I got twenty-one rejections and hesitantly passed in my resignation the next week.

I rarely think about the two weeks I failed at mastering a woodwind, my weakness in long-distance running, or my inability to make a sale to randomly canvassed addresses for new cable packages.

Instead, I remember the in the slot in my schedule that opened up from quitting the school band and allowed me to experiment with singing. I was selected for the District Chorus, joined the school choir and subsequently became a tenor in our musical theater department. I remember learning quickly that I was not meant to be a long-distance runner and proceeded to join the sprinting team and stay involved in track for more than two years. I remember moving from a door-to-door sales position to a marketing strategy internship, one which taught me more about product, user experience, and customer interaction than a summer of closed doors could.

In a society that values commitment and sees pushing through adversity as a hallmark of character, quitting carries an almost corrosive stigma. We are fed tall tales of rewards that come at the other side of perseverance and even worse, the regret that comes at the other side of abandoned suffering.

When we tell quitters they never win, we focus on the fact that there is only one reward. If you quit your sales position now, you’ll never be seen as a valuable asset to another company. If you quit your current job or current project, the scars of your fragmented career will make you unemployable. If you quit singing or running, you’ll never compare to your friends who seem to comparably excel at those pursuits.

You may have to sacrifice your motivation, enthusiasm, skill, emotional and physical health and well-valued time — but winners never quit.

Quitting is not uncommon, yet our negative stigmatization of quitting at an early age makes it a decision with a shadow of dissonance at every turn. What will people think if I quit my job? What will people assume if they see I couldn’t perform well in sales? How will my parents manage to tell my grandparents that their son is a quitter?

In the professional world, one of the greatest assets you can have is having an intuition of where to draw the line. Intuition drives your ability to build relationships and determine which people are supportive or deceptive. Intuition helps you understand the perfect fit for your skills and understand what you are consistently terrible at. Intuition is what delivers those nuanced goosebumps you feel when you’re excited. Everything from an appealing management style to a comfortable work environment enters your intuition before it rests in your conscious reasoning. When you dislike something, you feel it in your stomach. You feel it in the morning when you dread going to work or when you stay up late constantly thinking about how things could be different.

Quitting is hard; it’s even harder is staying somewhere when every fiber of your intuition says it’s time to go.

We need to create a culture where self-awareness takes precedent over commitment. The real winners are not those who don’t quit, but those who have enough self-awareness to understand where to draw the line.

When we discuss quitters never winning, we ignore the fact that the other side of quitting contains victories in itself. It contains freedom. It contains a heart beating back to normal, a mind returning to equanimity, and more awareness of your emotional Rubicon.

When we tell quitters they can’t win, we are telling people they should examine the value of a proverbial reward against the reward of their own personal gratification.

When we tell quitters they can’t win, we are telling people that they can’t trust their intuition. We are telling people that introspection is futile. We are telling people that they should worry more about their societal reputation than respecting themselves enough to walk away from anything that no longer serves them, grows them, or makes them happy.

Life is all about trial and error. Quitting is a part of the journey. When we see quitting as the end goal, instead of a part of the process, we devalue the other rewards that come from quitting. We miss out on the strong singers that never came to growth because they were told not to quit band.

Instead of teaching young people that quitting will lead to failure, we need to focus more time on helping them learn what characterizes their intuition. We need to focus on the feeling they get when they are happy, empowered, and zealous, remind them that they will encounter multiple areas in life where this feeling will never come, and trust their intuition when this happens. We need to remind them that the temporary damage of quitting is no match for the permanent damage that comes with staying in a bad place for too long.

In a world where we focus on the importance of self-awareness more than commitment, we may find more quitters. Instead, we’ll find more wholesome decision makers and less consistently anxious individuals.

In that respect, quitters may win quite a lot.

Kushaan is an IBM Consultant based out of Washington D.C. His interests are rooted in strategy consulting, entrepreneurship, social media, and the intersection of technology with social impact. He enjoys blogging about life, career insights, social technology, and hacking the corporate environment. If you liked this post, follow him on twitter: @kushaanshah or click “Follow” at the top for more posts on Medium.