Winners DO quit

There are many, many trite sayings like “Quitters never win, and winners never quit.” This is BS as far as I’m concerned. Sometimes strategic quitting is exactly what you need to do. These cliches only apply to your long-term goal (and then with some caveats!)

The key is to have clearly defined long-term goals that you hold as foremost importance and define your short-term goals as steps towards that goal. The short-term goals should ideally be ambitious!

Ask yourself: Is this taking me closer to my long-term goal, or further away?

Try this scenario, for instance: you’ve been working towards a personal best time at a specific race. You’ve followed a training plan for weeks or months and put in the hours of pain and sweat on the road. You’ve focused and committed yourself. You are mentally ready and psyched. Come race day, halfway through the run, you feel the twinge of an old injury. You know the signs. Injury is very likely and re-injuring the joint will put you on the bench for weeks. You could lose much of the gains you made. Do winners quit? In the Olympics? Probably not!  However, if your goal is lifetime fitness for physical and mental health, then quitting today makes absolute sense because the potential injury takes you further away from your long-term goals.

This sounds easy and sensible, right? Wrong! Ego, goal focus, pride, invested time and effort all push back! I find focused goals like these tremendously hard to abandon. Striving for and attaining a goal has a huge dopamine payoff - the stuff that makes us feel good and is also a key component of addiction. That’s great for mental health but really binds us to those goals.

How do you make a good decision about when to quit?

1.      Let go of pride. What other people think of you is none of your concern. Your journey is yours alone and frankly, no one really cares. People who are at your level will understand perfectly.

2.      Ego is not your friend, but proper re-framing of the goal context will help you here. Staying committed to a long-term goal while refocusing on the short-term goals is easier to process than being a quitter.

3.      Don’t be over-invested in the steps of the journey. That PB was a milestone towards a larger journey. Think of it as your GPS saying “Recalculating route” rather than a dead end. Come back next week and try again, rather than being sidelined for weeks, or simply shifting to the next goal.

4.      Focus on the benefits already achieved in this stage. In the “personal best” scenario, you have increased your health, fitness, stamina, and mental toughness. You’ve developed your goal-setting skills and built sound habits. The PB time was the least of that phase…nothing more than a pat on the back, really. Frame the short-term goal with multiple expected outcomes in your mind from the start to mitigate the feeling of failure if you can’t meet all of them – as can be expected from very ambitious goals.

5.      Trust yourself to quit for the right reasons (see Lesson 1)

6.      Ask yourself: Is this taking me closer to my long-term goal, or further away?

I regret more the times I persisted way past when I should have quit. Physically and career-wise, persisting to the point of burnout and injury cost me more than the times I quit sensibly.