The Dip

Seth Godin wrote a seventy-six page book that argues most of what your coaches, parents, and motivational posters told you about quitting is wrong. The whole "quitters never win and winners never quit" line that Vince Lombardi made famous? Godin calls it bad advice. Not a little wrong. Bad. The kind of slogan that has cost more careers than any recession.

His counter-argument is simple. Winners quit constantly. They just quit the right things at the right moments, and they refuse to quit the one thing they have decided to be the best at. That single inversion is the whole book. Everything else is examples, warnings, and tools for telling those two situations apart.

The Cult of Persistence Is Wrong

The trouble with grit as a virtue is that it works just as well on the highway to nowhere. A salesperson who calls the same disinterested prospect twenty-six times is admired for persistence. A doctor who refuses to abandon a treatment that is killing the patient gets sued. Persistence without judgment is just stubbornness wearing a nicer suit.

Godin's reframing of the problem starts with a brutal observation about most people's careers. They quit when things get painful and they stick around when they can't be bothered to leave. That is exactly backwards. The painful moments are usually where the rewards live, and the comfortable plateau is usually where your life is quietly draining away.

He calls the smart kind of quitting strategic quitting, and the dumb kind reactive quitting or serial quitting. Strategic quitting is a planned exit from a road that does not lead anywhere worth going. Reactive quitting is what happens when the going gets hard and you confuse hardness with hopelessness. Serial quitting is what happens when reactive quitting becomes a habit, and you find yourself at forty with twenty unfinished projects and no body of work.