Take it from Kramer- Quitting ain’t failure

Ramsay Banna take…

In Seinfeld Kramer and Jerry have a bet that Kramer will get rid of all his furniture and build different levels with carpeted steps. Jerry doesn’t believe him and so he bets he wouldn’t. Later on Kramer comes back to say that he is not doing it, to which the argument about who won the bet ensues.

Now this issue between them is more of a semantic one but it touches on a very important and subtle distinction, one that has a huge impact on one’s life. Is it a considered failing if you quit?

Society

Society at large has given us this impression that quitting is a moral failure, that we are letting our younger selves down, that quitting is for losers. Open any autobiography and you will see how they preach that they never quit even when the odds were heavily stacked against them and that is why they are where they are now. While this is undeniable it is incomplete. This information suffers from survivorship bias, which occurs when a successful subgroup is mistaken as the entire group, due to the invisibility of the failure subgroup. You wouldn’t read the story of a failed actor/musician/sportsman/entrepreneur for lessons and no doubt there are many that also did not quit and are still hoping for their ‘big break’ at 82.

Moreover, as Malcolm Gladwell outlines in his book ‘Outliers’ people tend to overemphasise the role they played in their success and skip (through no fault of their own, they may not have even been aware of it) all the other factors that came into play.

Quitting

Quitting has a bad reputation and I have seen many people close to me- including my sister- push on with something despite not enjoying it anymore for fear of the negative feelings that come with quitting. What drives this is a sunk cost fallacy- the idea that you have invested so much time/money/pain/blood, sweat and tears that giving up becomes harder as you go along because it is all for nothing.

But this touches on an important point. Is it all for nothing? If your measure of success is fame and fortune, and you have failed to achieve it in your pursuit, it is natural that that would be your conclusion. But perhaps the odds were stacked against you to begin with. You are statistically more likely to win the lottery than become famous- and yet when you buy the lottery ticket you don’t expect it will be the winning one like you expect your endevour will succeed.

So perhaps it is a case of reframing. Did you learn in the years you put time and energy into something? Did you come out wiser, more patient, hard working? Can you transfer those skills into something else?

Invest in yourself

If you are investing and the house price plummeted because the area is no longer attractive do you wait to it goes up again or sell it, cut your losses and invest with the money into something more lucrative? Similarly, with the limited time you have why not cut your losses and put it into something you now enjoy and can benefit from in the future. It is hard because you will be letting the little kid down but you let them down the moment you decided not to buy the lamborghini they used to say they would get when the grow up. Or every time you nap during the day when as a kid you swore you couldn’t wait to grow up and not nap. Keeping their promise is overrated. So give yourself permission to quit. Keep doing the thing if you enjoy it of course, but allow yourself to accept that you did not achieve what you set out to and that that is not failure.

In the words of Kramer “There’s no bet if I’m not doin’ it’’.

Ramsay Banna, a fan