The Art of Walking Away

We grow up on a steady diet of not quitting. Every school assembly, every motivational speech, every uncle at every wedding. Quitting is weakness. Quitting is the one terrible thing you must never do. It gets preached to us like the mantra to life, and the quotes are everywhere:

“If you don’t quit, you might make it. If you quit, you definitely won’t.”

“Our greatest weakness lies in giving up. The most certain way to succeed is always to try just one more time.”

“Fall seven times, stand up eight.”

Then come the stories. The farmer and the donkey. The tortoise and the hare. Edison failing a thousand times before the bulb finally lit up. J.K. Rowling getting turned away by publisher after publisher before Harry Potter. I heard them so often that at one point I was fairly sure the donkey was a family friend.

And that’s true, in a way. In the grander scheme of things, you should keep going.

It all makes total sense. Until it doesn’t.

Nobody teaches the other half

Everyone is taught not to be a quitter. Nobody is taught when to quit.

Nature likes a balance, right? For everyone who made it because they didn’t give up, there’s someone who lost everything because they didn’t give up. For everyone who missed out by quitting too early, there’s someone who went on to bigger things because they quit. The posters only ever print the first half.

So I think people should be taught when it’s okay to give up, too.

My résumé, in exits

I have been a quitter all my life. A professional, you could say, if I’d ever stayed anywhere long enough to be called one.

Content writer: 1 day. I walked away on day one, knowing I didn’t have the capacity for it. Some people find themselves in a job. I found myself out of one before the first chai break.
Travel agent: 2 months. Just long enough to save up for a mountaineering course, and to confirm that I did not want to be a travel agent.
A job in the mountains: 2 days. The owner was too nice to be true, and my spidey sense went haywire. I didn’t stay to find out why.
Another job: 2 months. I left with the confidence that I could do this on my own, and started Hygge Journeys.
Hygge Journeys: 4 years. I walked away when the market changed, and so did my responsibilities.
My first diving job: 3 months. I left to make room to pick up another skill and move out of the country.
My first job abroad. I walked away because they didn’t keep their end of the bargain.

Seven exits. If quitting were an Olympic sport, I’d at least make the squad.

Why I keep walking

Every one of those exits came at a dead end. And staying at a dead end, hoping things get better without doing anything, doesn’t make them better. It just makes you someone standing at a dead end for longer.

So I learned to shake things up when the going gets tough. When the going gets tough, the tough get going. Sometimes, quite literally, towards the door.

That doesn’t mean every call was right. There were mistakes. Sometimes things didn’t work out. Sometimes they did. But if you’re not putting in any effort, it doesn’t really matter whether you give up or hold on.

Quitters, but make it a pivot

Somewhere along the way, the startup world found a fancier word for what I’d been doing all along. They call it a pivot. Same move, better PR. When a founder does it, it’s strategic. When I did it, my relatives called it “again?”

Every time I walked away, someone was sure I was making a terrible mistake. And every time, some part of me wanted to turn around, point, and say “Bazinga!” Not because it always worked out. It didn’t. But because walking away was never the end of the joke. It was just the setup for the next one.

Funnily enough, the mountains had taught me this long before any startup did. On my mountaineering course, the very first thing they told us wasn’t how to tie a knot or use an ice axe. It was this: getting to the top is optional. Getting down is mandatory.

The Captain Cold method

There’s a line from Captain Cold, of all people, a supervillain from The Flash, that somehow became my life motto:

Make the plan. Execute the plan. Expect the plan to go off the rails. Throw away the plan.

My version is less family-friendly: expect the plan to fuck up.

Taking life advice from a man with a freeze gun is questionable, I know. But it works. Go into anything with a plan, fully expect it to fall apart, then deal with whatever comes next.

There’s a certain peace in that. You know that no matter how hard you try, some things just won’t work out, and you also know you’ll handle it when they don’t.

Sometimes that means holding on. Sometimes it means walking away. The art is knowing which.

— Yoki