Quit It
In his column today, even Thomas Friedman suggests that it may be time for the U.S. to leave Iraq, which makes me glad not only because he has he mostly supported the invasion, but also because it’s great to see a nationally-syndicated columnist endorse one of my own favorite courses of action: quitting.
Most of the time, quitting gets a bad rap, you know, “quitters never win.” But that’s not fair: lots of times quitting is not only the preferable course of action, it’s also the most reasonable, sensible, and even victorious thing to do.
I’ve quit jobs, relationships, schools, teams, projects, classes, activities, and habits (both good and bad) ; I’ve even quit quitting, and I can’t think of any time I’ve really regretted it.
I quit a busboy job after 3 hours, a lawn-mowing job in a morning; I dropped out of a college in 2 weeks, a language class after one session, and a math course as soon as the professor handed out the syllabus.
Naturally, there’s something to be said for sucking it up and working through difficulties, but “toughing it out,” when it’s obvious it would be better to just get out strikes me as overly hard-headed.
The hardest part of quitting is before you do it and the worst aspect of it is afterwards when you kick yourself for not having done so sooner.
I agonized for weeks before resigning from this awful desktop-publishing job I had in LA in 1989; the second I quit, though, I felt fine; I only wondered why I had put up with it for so long.
Should the U.S. up and leave Iraq, there will be people who say that we should have stuck it out. But the big difference between those people and the ones we’re putting up with now is that they won’t by trying to kill us with roadside bombs.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather quit Iraq than quit living.
Most of the time, quitting gets a bad rap, you know, “quitters never win.” But that’s not fair: lots of times quitting is not only the preferable course of action, it’s also the most reasonable, sensible, and even victorious thing to do.
I’ve quit jobs, relationships, schools, teams, projects, classes, activities, and habits (both good and bad) ; I’ve even quit quitting, and I can’t think of any time I’ve really regretted it.
I quit a busboy job after 3 hours, a lawn-mowing job in a morning; I dropped out of a college in 2 weeks, a language class after one session, and a math course as soon as the professor handed out the syllabus.
Naturally, there’s something to be said for sucking it up and working through difficulties, but “toughing it out,” when it’s obvious it would be better to just get out strikes me as overly hard-headed.
The hardest part of quitting is before you do it and the worst aspect of it is afterwards when you kick yourself for not having done so sooner.
I agonized for weeks before resigning from this awful desktop-publishing job I had in LA in 1989; the second I quit, though, I felt fine; I only wondered why I had put up with it for so long.
Should the U.S. up and leave Iraq, there will be people who say that we should have stuck it out. But the big difference between those people and the ones we’re putting up with now is that they won’t by trying to kill us with roadside bombs.
Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather quit Iraq than quit living.
posted by Professor Dave at 11:05 AM
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