Quitting something whether it doesn’t work anymore or just find new opportunities is underrated. This may be because we quit things all the time.
People give up and stop going to the gym after a couple of months, students drop out of their courses after the first semester, and registered companies with the CIPC hardly sell a single service or product.
The real value in quitting something is when you’re able to spot and realize when something isn’t working anymore. We struggle to let go of things and accept that they have reached their peaked because we often view them based on sunken cost and instead of the opportunity cost tied to quitting that particular thing and opening ourselves up for new opportunities.
It took me a number of years to realize that an idea(Flex Urban Online Market) was not as good as I thought it was because I was so heavily invested in it.
But every hour you spend on a dead project, is you taking away that hour you could use building something better.
It’s easy to be comfortable is an environment we are familiar with while quitting puts us into the unknown.
In Scott Adams’ book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big’, he talked about meeting a CEO on a plane who offered him some career advice. He said that every time he got a new job, he immediately started looking for a better one. Now that seems crazy and unheard of because we generally think that sticking it out with one company for years and years is the right way to go about climbing the corporate ladder but it’s not particularly true.
Economist Henry Siu found that young people who switched jobs more often earned higher salaries in later life.
Job-hopping also may help you climb the career ladder. In one survey of 12,500 alumni of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, respondents who had fewer than two roles in 15 years had a 1 in 50 chance of becoming a top-level leader. Those who held five or more positions were nine times more likely to reach senior management. Head researcher Edward Lazear suggests that to be a top leader, you may need a wide range of skills best provided (and proven) by a variety of roles.”
Why you sometimes have to quit to win
There also numerous case studies of entrepreneur who dropout out of university and became successful founders, such as BIll Gates(Microsoft founder), Steve Jobs(Apple founder), Michael Dell(Dell founder), Mark Zuckerburg(Facebook founder), Jan Koum(WhatsApp founder), Travis Kalanick(Uber founder) and Jack Dorsey(Twitter co-founder).
It takes practice and awareness knowing when to quit, you don’t want to quit an just as your work is about to pay off but you also need to be okay with letting go of something that’s not working in order to chase something greater.