From Seth Godin's The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick):
Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations. Reactive quitting and serial quitting are the bane of those that strive (and fail) to get what they want. And most people do just that. They quit when it's painful and stick when they can't be bothered to quit...
Strategic quitting is a conscious decision you make based on the choices available to you. If you realize 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...
Coping is what people do when they try to muddle through... The problem with coping is that it never leads to exceptional performance... All coping does is waste your time and misdirect your energy. If the best you can do is cope, you're better off quitting. Quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you up to excel at something else...
Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other.
In my experience most of us are overcommitted, spreading ourselves too thin, and failing to deliver excellence where it really counts. We're coping, when we should be quitting. I hear an echo of Peter Drucker in Godin's message:
One should waste as little effort as possible on improving areas of low competence. It takes far more energy and work to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than it takes to improve from first-rate performance to excellence.
The implicit corollary to Drucker's message (which Godin picks up and makes explicit) is that only excellence matters. Improving from incompetence to mediocrity is worse than useless, because time and effort expended in those areas are being stolen from areas where excellence is within our grasp.
I find it liberating to start thinking along these lines, not only in my professional life but also in my personal life. Where can I deliver excellence? Where should I expect excellence in return? And how can I focus my time and energy to make this as likely as possible?
This allows me to do some strategic quitting--or even better, not to start misguided efforts in the first place--and substantially increase the return on my personal investments. And even when I can't quit outright, I'm better able to set boundaries that put projects and activities in perspective and prevent them from hogging resources (most significantly, my finite time and energy) that they don't deserve.
Photo by alexdecarvalho. Yay Flickr and Creative Commons.
