Jay Papasan:
All right. So, picture this. You’re in seventh grade, you’re at a big track meet in the biggest stadium you’ve ever been in. Your family’s watching, your friends are watching, and your race is the mile race. You start off, you’re running well, and by the time we get to the final lap, you’re actually in the lead, but it’s close. There are people right behind you. And exactly halfway through the last lap of the race, your legs get tripped up and you go down hard. I mean, bloody hard, no breath hard. And by the time you look up, the people that you were ahead of are rounding the turn and heading for the finish line.
So what choice do you make? Do you get up and walk across the track to the bench bloody disappointed, maybe even angry? Or do you stumble around the track and actually cross the finish line? Let me tell you the choice I made that day. Impacted the way I looked at quitting for the next three decades.
I’m Jay Papasan. And this The ONE Thing, your weekly guide to the simple steps that lead to extraordinary results.
So, here’s the full story. So, that race, when I was in seventh grade, was a big deal. And I remember I made the choice to walk across the infield. I was hurt. I was incredibly disappointed. I had been going all out. It was one of the best races I’d ever run. And I get to the bench, and my dad is standing at the railing, and I go over to see them, and I’m expecting him to say, “Ah, that’s too bad.” You know, all the things that you kind of want to hear when you’re a seventh grader from your dad. But I remember he looked at me. And this is like a big moment in my life. He said, “Jay, if you had walked across the finish line, no matter how hard it was, you would’ve gotten a standing ovation.”
And I remember thinking, “Oh crap, I screwed that up. And I disappointed my father.” And he was someone I really looked up to and still do. And I just remember, that made such a huge impact. I was like, “I am not gonna be a quitter. I am not gonna be a quitter. I’m just not going to quit. No matter how bad it is, I’m gonna stick it out.”
And I can tell you that attitude has been a gift. It has been a superpower. How else could I finish all the books? Building the businesses? There are so many hard things that require perseverance and grit. And man, I indexed on it. In fact, it became a badge of honor. And you’re listening to this, you might feel the same way, that you make a commitment to yourself or other people, and you just absolutely will not quit on them or yourself.
The challenge is that superpower can quickly become an Achilles heel if you misuse it. So, I tracked my reading since about, I don’t know, 2012, 2013. I just knew to be a great writer, to create content, I had to be very thoughtful about how I read. So, I’ve read close to about 800 books and I’ve only quit four of them, and that is just wrong.
I mean, there are a lot of books that don’t deserve more than five pages. When I worked at Harper Collins as an editor, I had a stack of manuscripts. The only way to survive when you were trying to review that many high-profile manuscripts from powerful agents and authors is you had to make quick decisions. Like at any given week, I had 12 full book manuscripts I was supposed to review for my editor. And I had a five and 50 rule. If they couldn’t keep my attention for five pages, it was an immediate rejection. If they made it through five, I would go 50. And then, if I made it past 50 pages, I might commit to reading the whole thing.
But as you can imagine, most of these raw manuscripts, I didn’t get past five pages. I just created a rule to help me survive. And somewhere along the way, I kind of lost my way. Like in my own personal reading, I would plow through books hoping for some win, sit through movies I should have gotten up and left, so many things that I could have quit and gotten that time back.
So, let me just tell you, and this is like I need this podcast episode as much as anyone as a reminder, not quitting isn’t about integrity, right? It’s not about you being a person of your word. Yes, it can be sometimes, but not quitting isn’t about integrity. Actually, sometimes, it can be a betrayal. What you’re actually betraying is your future self because you’ve stuck to the things that you should have quit. You don’t have space, time, or energy for the things that you should be starting and continuing. And that’s the conundrum that we get. And that’s the huge cost of not quitting.
And you look around, what does the world tell us, right? All day, every day is winners don’t quit and quitters don’t win. That’s a mantra. So, we hear this when we don’t quit, we get rewarded for it. When we stick it out, people tell us how tough and gritty we are. We rarely get any sort of social feedback from quitting. Maybe our loved ones, like, “You should have quit that job a long time ago. I give you permission to quit that book,” whatever it is. But it’s rare that we get rewarded for quitting.
I know Annie Duke, if you’ve not read her books, she’s written several of my favorites. And this one in particular is from the book Quit, where she talked about the science of quitting. She was a professional poker player. She had to know how to fold. The only way you win the World Championship of Poker is if you are the best person at quitting on a hand that you don’t think you can win, so that you can put your chips in for the ones you can. It’s just gambling. It is how do I make my strategic investments of time or chips in her case?
And she just made the observation that people today, especially young people, are far too indexed on grit. They’re trying to be too tough and stick it out when they probably should be quitting and trying new things. And I think that observation is generally true. It certainly was in my case. Perseverance can benefit us in the things that matter, and it actually harms us when we aim at the things that don’t.
Every hour you invest in the wrong thing is an hour you don’t get to invest in the right thing. It’s just simple math. You have a limited amount of time every day. And how you’ve invested is often the difference between the most successful, most contented people in the world and the people who are the most overwhelmed and miserable.
How we invest that time, and I’ll walk you through in this episode, some of the reasons it’s hard to do and give you a framework by the end on the best ways to do it that’ll tap into some of the stories that I’m gonna tell you along the way. So, when you think of the hours that you’re spending on the wrong things instead of the right things, you have to ask yourself the question, what is it you’re neglecting?
When we neglect our relationships and our health, we often see those results very publicly. People end up estranged, they get divorced, and we point to them and said, “Ah, that person was neglecting their relationships for their business, or whatever it was.” And that becomes a cautionary tale. Someone breaks down, they have a health crisis, maybe they have a heart attack or I hear a lot of people in our world that are always operating at the edge, they actually suffer from adrenal failure, where their adrenal gland can’t put out cortisol anymore because it’s worn out from your constant state of being in this fight or flight mode, and we see them and they go to the hospital or they get in trouble, or they have to go through this period where they have to really slow down. They’re like, it’s a cautionary tale.
What we don’t see are the cautionary tales around people who neglected their own dreams, that because they were saying yes and so many of the leaders that show up and my executive coaching discoveries or in our coaching discoveries, they’re saying yes to their business and they’re saying yes to their family. And because of that, they’re saying no to all of these other things. And the cost of that is absolutely hidden from sight. And unless you know someone who shared their journey, you don’t often see it.
So, the cost of not learning how to strategically quit, I’m not talking about giving up, I’m gonna really break out the difference. There’s giving up and there’s strategic quitting, and there’s a big difference between the two. The cost is all of the time that we invest in the wrong things and all the time we miss that we could have invested, that we could have spent with loved ones, that we could have spent doing the things that bring us joy instead of all of the other stuff.
I’ll ask you a question. Are you succeeding because of all the things you do or in spite of them? I’ve been asked that question by my coach before because it’s easy to fall into this trap where you’re just doing everything because you have been able to, and it feels like a superpower, and you just keep doing it and keep doing, but here’s the truth. When you actually go through the process and you really look at what most people are investing their time in, most of us, myself at times, and I’m sure a lot of you too, we’re succeeding in spite of most of the things we’re doing. It’s the 80/20, it’s The ONE Thing. There’s a handful of things that we do and we do regularly that leads to the vast majority of our success. And can we tell the difference?
Now, the cost of this time is weird. Like, if you’ve ever done an audit of your bank accounts, like sometimes you find like, what is this $9 a month charge? And it’s that app that you forgot you signed up for, that you deleted from your phone, but you didn’t actually quit. Now, if that was like a, not just like an app charge, like those little charges slip through the news sometimes, but what about like a car payment or a house payment? You would not go more than a month, maybe two before you’d be like, “Why the heck am I being charged $600 a month?” You’d be angry. You’d be furious that you missed it. You would call them up and say, “No, I paid that off,” or “No, I quit that service. I want a refund and you need to stop billing me.”
We don’t get that way about our investments of time. Every week, we’re investing our time in these little and big things that don’t matter. And because we’re just busy and we’re caught up in the illusion that this busyness is actually productivity, sometimes we don’t ever do an audit. So, I’m gonna walk through some of the reasons why it’s so hard to see or why we’re so attached. And then, again, I’m gonna go through a quick three-point framework for how you can go into your yeses and evaluate your yeses better, so that you can quit more often and more strategically.
One of the best lessons I got, I remember sitting in the audience, Seth Godin was doing his book The Dip, and if you’ve never read The Dip, it’s a great one and it’s a short one. But the big lesson for me, I don’t even remember what the whole book was about, is there was a story about a kid that worked in the newsroom in this big, big building, like he delivered the mail, like old school, and he had grown up through the ranks and become an executive, but the old guard still saw him as his old self. And the obvious answer to everybody, but this kid was, he should quit. He needs to go to a new environment, but it is so hard.
And that was the first time I heard someone, really like an authority figure, someone I looked up to, and this was Seth Godin. It was probably 2008-2009, something like that. And he just said, “Guys, Winners quit. Winners quit. They quit, so they can win. They win because they quit the things they do not help them win. Winners are actually the best quitters of all.” So, that’s a new frame that we have to put around our time and how we say yes and no to things. It’s not that winners never quit and quitters never win. It’s actually just the opposite. Winners win because they’re able to quit. They quit the things that don’t matter, and they stay focused on the things that do.
Okay. So, let’s talk really quickly before we get to the break about what are the reasons that we really struggle to quit besides like the social pressure and maybe our identity around – like for me, I had it as a badge of honor. Like I don’t quit stuff. I can stick it out. I’m the marathon man. So, there’s a lot of stuff going on.
First and foremost, and if you followed me, you know that there’s usually this moment in truth that a lot of people are doing something and they’re not getting the results., And because they’re not getting the results, they think they’re doing the wrong thing. But a lot of things, especially extraordinary things, you have to do the activities. You have to kind of pull the lever again and again to get the result. And again and again, it’s heartbreaking. People quit just before the miracle happens. They are so close to the success that is waiting for them but they quit too soon.
So, the danger in diving into strategic quitting is you’re gonna give up too soon. So, giving up is just that, “I give up, I’m done trying. I’m not gonna try.” Strategic quitting is when you look at it and you ask the question, “Have I done this the right way? Is that the reason I’m not getting success? Have I done it long enough to get the results I expect? Do I have perspective on this ? Or am I being unrealistic about it?” And if the answer to those is, you’re kind of doing it the right way, you’ve put all of the investment in it, and you’re still not getting the results, now you’ve made an informed decision to quit it.
That’s the difference. It’s just a tiny bit of thought that goes into it versus throwing down your toys and going home. “I’m frustrated. I give up.” No, that’s not a mature business person. That’s not what success looks like. We have to strategically stay engaged and we have to strategically quit.
Knowing the difference can be hard. That’s one of the reasons we have coaches. But am I quitting too soon? But the thing that we really, really want to avoid is going beyond the expiration date. And those things tend to be really obvious. And I’ll just tell you, as someone who’s done a lot of coaching and has worked with a lot of teams, when you ask people, “What are the things that are not serving me in this season?”, most people have a list. A lot of them are very obvious. They’re not falling anywhere in this gray area.
But if you’ve got this badge of honor, that devil whispering in your ear, “You’re not a quitter. You don’t quit,” and that’s not allowing you to say no to these things, that’s where you have to do some of the math or around really big things. You’ve made a big social push. Everybody thinks, “Oh, Jay started this business.” If I have to stop that business, I have a lot of social pressure I have to wade through, so I really wanna be analytical about it. If I have a lot of money invested, I wanna be analytical about it. I want it to be a very strategic decision. I’ll tell you, 80% of the time, it’s really easy to identify the things that we could just cut and move on from, because we know they don’t matter. So, don’t do too much. I’ll give you the framework. There’s not a million things that fall into that gray area.
The next thing is the sunk cost fallacy. And so, if you’re an investor, you understand this. And it’s the idea that when we’ve invested a lot of money in something that we’re very averse to pulling the plug. And so, people talk about this a lot of times with stocks. You bought it at a hundred. And people will write it down. It’s 75, it’s 70, it’s 65, and they keep thinking of all the money they invested, “If I just wait long enough, it’ll bounce back.” And investors understand this. Some of those, you’re just gonna chase your money all the way to the bottom, and you’re doing it because you’re identifying with a hundred dollars and you’re devaluing the 75 you still have left. Save that money and put it into a better investment where it can grow versus hoping that somehow the tide will turn.
And so, we fall prey to this because when we invest time or money, we have an attachment to that outcome. And so, we have to be very wary of that. The more time or money you invest in something, especially when it’s going poorly, the more likely you are to be averse to pulling the plug ’cause you’d be like, “Ah. Now, there’s no other way to say than that was wasted time.” But I would also challenge that. We have a chance to learn from that experience. If you learn from the mistake, from the bad investment of time or money, that will serve you in the future, and that means you did get a payout, just not the one you expected.
Sometimes, the best education has a price tag of time or money. But if we don’t learn the lesson, we’re gonna keep learning it until we do. That’s how life works. Life will keep teaching you the lesson until you learn it, and you will keep paying the cost until you learn it. So, the sunk cost fallacy is one of those things.
Now, an example in everyday life is a lot of us do this with me, with books. Ah, I’m already a hundred pages through. I might as well just finish it. You’re in a really horrible movie. Gosh, we made the choice. We came to the movie theater or we started it. I’m halfway through. I’m just gonna stick it out. So, that’s how it looks. A lot of times with just your time invested, there’s not much money involved, but you also fall prey there.
I wrote about it in my newsletter, the 20 Percenter, how I went to a movie. I went to see Sister Act three. This is way back when. And it was horrible, but I looked over and my date had actually fallen asleep. I could have just tapped her in the shoulder and said, “Let’s get up and leave.” But for whatever reason, maybe I’m still that seventh grader on the track. I just like, “Well, maybe it’ll get better.” So, we have to learn to get past this idea that because we’ve already invested in it, we have to stick it out.
The other one, which plays very closely to that, is this idea of loss aversion. We tend to feel our losses about twice as hard as our wins. So, if a gambler wants a hundred dollars in the casino, they get five points of joy. But if they lose a hundred dollars, they might get 10 points of negative emotions.
And, so this idea of that loss looms larger sometimes than the win we could get by just moving on. So just be aware, this idea of declaring a loss, we’re just incredibly averse to that. It’s in our heads and you have to kind of be aware of it to avoid it.
And the last one is this idea of the commitment bias, and this is probably the heart of my badge of honor stuff. Because I’ve committed to this publicly and I’ve made it an endeavor. And the more people that are involved, it can actually become bigger and harder to unwind. And so, commitment bias plays the same way. We’ve made a big commitment of resources and time to something. And the longer we continue to do that, regardless of the outcomes, the more likely we are to want to stick it out.
Now, some people call this the Concord Paradox. ’cause if you go back in history and you remember the Concord, it was a supersonic jet. They literally wasted billions trying to make it into a commercial venture, and it just wasn’t working. But here’s a whole institution, a whole corporation that is seeing the dollars go red, red, red. But they were caught in this whole idea of the commitment to this idea of supersonic flight and all of the time and everything that they had invested.
So, this commitment bias, even to a losing positing, can not only affect us individually, it can affect us in groups. be the ones who waved the white flag. We don’t wanna be the ones who said, well, that was a mistake. But I’ll tell you, that’s actually what leadership looks like a lot of the time.
So, before we go to break, I’m just gonna hit you with this one. Strategic quitting is not giving up. It’s actually how you level up. You need to remember that. That needs to be your mantra. Now, let’s go to break and I’ll see you on the other side.
All right, welcome back. Let’s talk about a success story. I’ve told you all the bad things and all the things that happen when we don’t quit and the reasons why, but I’ll give you my probably favorite example of someone who strategically quit and it paid off marvelously.
Maybe you’ve heard of Stuart Butterfield. Maybe you haven’t, but I’ll tell you a story. He’s an entrepreneur. He raised a lot of money for a couple of startups. He had a game company, a multiplayer game company, and a software company called Glitch. And I’ll tell you the story that I know best, which is around the multiplayer game. And he’s trying to build this huge world, a revolutionary engine, and he’s getting people to engage in the beta. People are showing up, they’re playing the game and they’re loving the game. But all of their engineers, everything, they’re trying, they can’t seem to make it viral. Like how do we make this thing actually blow up?
And I remember he just set out a test, and I think he did two of these. They did a big push. They asked the users what was missing to make the experience even better. And they went out and tested it. And what happened is that they saw the people who were engaged were engaged for an absurd amount of time. Like, by any other measure for a gaming company, this would be victory. Look how much time they’re spending on the platform. They clearly love the experience. And the mistake would be to only look at that.
But Stewart’s up there and he’s looking up and he’s taking millions and millions of dollars from his investors, not just so a few people could have a good time playing the game, so that hopefully they can sell millions of this thing. And what he’s not seeing is those people bringing other people to the experience. He’s not seeing some sort of growth that hits an elbow of the curve, which is absolutely necessary for that business.
And so, he made a really, really tough decision. He wrote an email to all of his investors and said, “Based on what I’m seeing, I do not believe we’re going to reach our goals. And I’m pulling the plug.” And this was a guy who had a big reputation, and I imagine that really took a massive amount of courage to walk away. And sometimes, walking away is the thing that requires a lot of courage and is the thing that is the best use of our courage. But he did that.
And the great end of the story, what I love is when he’s looking up, people are like, “What happened? Why did you do that?” ’cause he could have burnt through millions more trying to solve the problem. But he did his test and he didn’t believe in it anymore. He looked up and they did have one thing that they were using that he thought maybe I can market this. They had a messaging platform that they were using for their developers to communicate and build these two different companies.
And guess what? That messaging platform is what you now, and probably use way too much and are irritated about, called Slack that he went on to sell for a little under $30 billion. So, Stewart Butterfield strategically quit not once, but twice. I know the story of the gaming story. He took and refunded, got sent back all of these millions of dollars and had to start over. And he lost maybe any momentum he had, but he did the math. He had a criteria that if they weren’t gonna hit it. Like, why are we gonna keep plowing forward?
There’s a point at which if you look at what’s actually happening, you realize I’m just banging my head against the wall. And he was wise enough to see it. And that allowed him to pivot, put his energy, his investors’ money into something that’s become wildly successful.
And we see it again and again in The ONE Thing. We get people to go through an exercise to identify the things that are missing and the things that should be missing from the calendar, and then walk them through the stages of how to get there. And the achievers are the one who get to the other side. I can tell you again and again, they manage to start clawing back their schedules so that the time that was wasted on lesser things gets invested in better things. Things that are not always about making money. They could be about making and deepening relationships, all of the other things that life is about, but that’s what we look up to.
You know, I go back to Seth Godin. He was the first person to introduce this idea. Quitting isn’t about being a loser. Winners are the ones who actually quit, but you have to do it strategically. So, by putting boundaries, by quitting the things that aren’t working or are just kind of tepid and not exciting, they don’t have a chance to really go where we want them to go, we stop fooling ourselves around, “Well, maybe it’ll work someday.” And we start right then of investing our energy in the handful of things that really do matter. That’s what’s important, and that’s what we want for you.
So, let’s walk through a framework really quickly on how you can go into projects with a clear idea of how you can quit and when to quit, which is a great secret way to make this happen.
So, the strategic quitting framework is kind of a three-step process. and it’s kind of based on Annie Duke’s research, and I love this, and she said in her experience, the people who were the best at strategic quitting went into something with clear criteria for what would have to happen to stick with it or if this happens, we are absolutely quitting. And again, the poker analogy, right? If you bet on a unsuited two and a seven, it is supposed to be the worst hand in poker, you might get lucky and win, but it was still a horrible bet.
So, you look up and she’s all about, “How do I manage my resources responsibly so that the wins that I do win are big wins, and I avoid all of the messy losses.” She had a clear criteria based on the two cards that she saw, what her odds were for winning, and then she would either quit or she would move forward. And that’s what great people do in business as well and great in life. So, how do we establish those criteria becomes the question.
So, first one is called pre-mortem planning. So, before you do the thing, you ask the question, “If this happens, we will quit or if this doesn’t?” And so, that’s like with cards, that’s how it works. If you’ve ever read about Everest, when they go to the summit, they have a 1:00 PM turnaround time, and it’s just a rule. Doesn’t matter if you’re 10 feet from the summit, if it’s 1:00 PM you turn and go down the mountain at one o’clock, period, end of story. And they figured out that that’s kind of this moment of no return. The likelihood that you might die if you stayed longer, goes way up. The likelihood that you will die before that time if you turn around is way down. So, one o’clock is the rule.
So what is the rule for you? When you’re trying a new endeavor, I’m gonna try this hobby, I’m gonna try this sport, I’m gonna try this marketing campaign, how many reps are you willing to give it to know that you gave it a fair shot before you start? So, if this happens, I will continue or if this happens, I will quit. Start and have some hypothesis around it.
I remember right before I had my first big back surgery. I was trying literally everything that I could try to solve my back pain without actually going under the knife. And my dad worked for a medical device company. I worked for one for a while. So, like I understood surgery, I knew it could be beneficial, but I also knew that fusion surgery was highly over-diagnosed. And the best advice I got as I was going from provider to provider is another guy who’d been on the journey. He said, “Jay, you can give everybody 12 weeks and give it your all. But if what they’re asking you to do isn’t making a meaningful difference, you need to fire them and move to the next.” And I was like, “Why is that? “He goes, “In this realm,” ’cause he’d been down the journey, “most things you can see meaningful progress is after 12 weeks. After that, they’re probably experimenting on you.”
And I’ve heard from other people over the years that I’ve shared the stories. Like they’ve literally walked into their doctor’s office and they’re like reading a book or reading an article. They are about to experiment on you. They’ve gone through their bag of tricks. So, I remember that 12-week rule allowed me to go from yoga to Pilates to stretching, you name it, as a raw thing, like I can give you a long list of things that I tried, but I gave them a reasonable amount of time. And then if that didn’t work, I went to the next. So, figure out your criteria going in. It’s called the pre-mortem test.
Two, regular reviews. If you listen to episode 521 with Chris Ducker, he talks about the fact that he and his team regularly, I can’t remember if it’s quarterly or annually, they go through this stop, stay, start, and they ask the question, what is working? We want to continue those. What are the things that are working? We wanna stay on those. And what’s missing? Where do we need to start? By stopping first, they give room to bring in more time to the things that are working and add the things that are missing.
It’s a very simple formula, but if you don’t step back and audit it every once in a while, and just ask the question, you’ve gotta have a moment to reflect, “Hey, when I look at everything that’s on my plate, what are the things that I feel filled up by that’s giving me energy, that’s helping me get ahead? And what are the things I’m just kind of doing because I think I have to, or because I said yes a long time ago and I haven’t thought that I could quit?” So, regularly evaluate. I think, you could do it right now, but I think anything more than a quarter is probably overdoing it. But definitely, a couple of times a year, you want to do this what is working, what’s not working, and what’s missing, kind of, framework so that you can identify the things that you do strategically need to quit.
And like I said earlier, about 80% of the things we need to quit, there’s no gray about it. We just know we said yes to the wrong thing. It’s not working. We don’t like it. It doesn’t serve us or the business. We just need to get around to saying no to it. We need to hit the quit button and go on.
And finally, you need to get external perspective for the handful of things that you really don’t know. Should I quit it or should I stick to it? Because we do know that perseverance does matter in some things. Our big one thing, the things that are gonna take us years into the future, those are the things we want to stick to. Are we quitting really on the right things?
So, you can look to your team.If you’ve got a good team around you that could help you, you can do data. You know, I’ve wear one of these Apple watches and I track the data, and is this workout actually working for me? Do I see progress? So, you can do it by yourself with data, you can do it with your team. I think the best people. Invest in a coach because they aren’t gonna be privy to any of the biases like you and your team. You chose the things that you’re doing, and so you may be attached to the sunk cost fallacy or the commitment bias because those are the things that you invested in and your identity is tied up in. An outside coach or maybe it’s a partner on the outside, a friend, a peer partner, someone that’s on the outside can give you a more honest perspective.
So, those would be the three steps. You need to go into it with a pre-mortem criteria. If it doesn’t do these things or it does these things, I will quit or I will stick. You need to regularly review that. Did that measure show up or not? Because sometimes, we set the criteria and then we just forget about it. So, you need to regularly check in and say, “Did it meet that criteria or not? Should I quit it or move on?” And then, occasionally, you want to make sure that you’re getting perspective from someone on the outside. This is why companies bring in consultants. It’s why leaders bring in coaches into their lives, but you need that around you, so that you don’t have a blind spot and aren’t just powering through something like I did for so many years that you just should have strategically quit a long time ago.
So, strategic quitting frees up your energy. The more energy you have, the more energy you have for your one thing. Like when we talk about going small in the book, this is what we mean. You’re gonna focus on the handful of things that matter, which means you’re gonna neglect a lot of stuff that doesn’t. A lot of those things that feel urgent and they’re loud are simply not important, and we just need to ignore them but it does sometimes take help.
Saying no to good things gives you free to say, yes to the things that matter. Good is not good enough. I want not just to say no to the bad stuff, I wanna say no to the average stuff, so that I can do great things with my time.
So, at the end of the day, I just hope you hear this message again and again. Strategic quitting is not the same as giving up. It’s actually how you level up. And I would tell you that strategic quitting is actually you leaning into your agency. You are taking back control of your time. You’re not blindly spending it. You’re not caught up in this hamster wheel of busyness like so many of us are. You’re taking back control.
And if you even do it in small bites, you can start to see the benefit and gain confidence to do it again and again. Establish a tiny beach head in your calendar where you’re saying no to something and reclaiming that time. It doesn’t have to be four hours a week like we teach in our training when we’re really trying to build out in a very systematic way, get people to eliminate a lot of stuff in a very short period of time. You could start for just 30 minutes, but how do you start regaining control of your time, have the agency to know what to put into it, so that you’re investing more of your time into the handful of things that really matter and less time into all of the stuff that we get caught up in?
So, I want to give you your weekly challenge. And so, what I’m challenging you to do, whether you go through the full audit or not, I would hope that you can sit down right now and ask the question, what is one thing that I’m currently doing, either because I’ve been doing it and feel committed to it for the wrong reasons, or I’m doing it because I think other people expect me to, that you can quit today?
I bet you already had that thought in your head while you were listening to this episode. You might have been listing a few things. I’m gonna email the PTA and say, “I just can’t do this at this time.” I’m going to email this person and say, “We need to take a rain check.” It might be a short-term obligation, it might be a long-term obligation, but I absolutely am sure that you can say no and quit something today, and that will free up a little bit of your time, a little bit of your energy, and give you a little bit more clarity. I hope that you’ll take the challenge.
So, next week we’ve got a real treat for you. I’m interviewing Morgan Housel. He has sold over 10 million copies of his books, which boggles the mind. ’cause I remember when his first book came out, the Psychology of Money, we got to interview him before it had sold a hundred thousand copies and it’s absolutely brilliant. His next book called Same as Ever was also brilliant. And his book that we’re talking about next week is called The Art of Spending Money. And we go through all kinds of great stuff. The psychology of how we make bad decisions with our money, how there is all of this information on how to make money and so little on how to wisely invest it. We talk about money and our kids. We talk about money and our values. We cover a lot of ground very quickly. ’cause if you know Morgan Hausel, he talks like he’s had five espressos. So, this might be one to turn it down from one and a half speed to just a one speed ’cause we cover a lot of ground. I can’t wait to share it with you next week.
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