Quitting - With Another Name

I was searching down a list of books that is offered free on-line from work. I was pretty much caught up with what I had to get done that day and thought I'd scroll through the selection just to see if there was anything even slightly interesting. Mostly, what this list has to offer are business, how to become a better this or that type of books I don't especially have any interest in reading. Then for some unknown reason while I was scrolling through the boring titles, I stopped and clicked into a book called the Mastering the Art of Quitting: Why it Matters in Life, Love and Work by Peg Streep and Alan Bernstein. Then I opened it and started reading it. (No. I wasn't interested because I was thinking of quitting my job - just for the record).

Everyone remembers the childrens story about the Little Engine that Could. "I think I can, I think I can..." If you keep trying, you will to accomplish what you set out to do, or so the story goes. "Winners never quit and Quitters never win".  Right? Well, not necessarily. This books talks about goal disengagement. (You see, it's not quitting - it's goal disengagement). It started with explaining how we think of quitting in a negative light. If you are labeled a quitter it is never a good thing. So you are never supposed to quit. Now it isn't talking about real quitters (everyone knows one - the person that is lazy, disappears whenever real work turns up, stops when it gets hard). It's talking about the situations or goals we put on ourselves that don't work out and are possibly making us unhappy by sticking with them. 

Why do we continue to stay a course at all costs? It gave some pretty good reasons like intermittent reinforcement, near-win situations, and sunk-cost fallacies. I could go into explaining each of these but it's pretty much, you hang in there because every once in a while along the way it seems like it's working out or you've put so much money into it you feel like you can't lose the money you've already lost so you put more into it. I mean, you can't quit now! But you should. Putting more money into a losing situation isn't going to do anything except lose more money if you don't disengage from whatever is going wrong with the original goal and find a new one. Thus, the concept of goal disengagement is in order to allow the exploration of new possibilities. It isn't quitting.

And here they wrote a whole book about it. 

That's pretty impressive. It's all in how you look at it, I guess. Or write it. I wonder if there is a goal I need to disengage myself from. Nah!  Everything seems to be in order.  I think I can, I think I can.

TT