getAbstract book summary, "Mastering the Art of Quitting"

Peg Streep and Alan Bernstein

Da Capo Press © 2013

getAbstract © 2014

Rating (10 is best)

Overall: 8
Applicability: 8
Innovation: 7
Style: 7

Take-Aways

• Persistence in pursuit of a goal is valuable. So is knowing when to quit.
• Your brain is hard-wired for persistence – as is American culture, beginning with the children’s story, The Little Engine That Could.
• Setting aside unworkable objectives sets you free to pursue better goals.
• Fear of failure can blind you to the need to quit chasing a goal that isn’t working.
• Not all quitting is healthy. Quitting with threats or staging a “disappearing act” feeds underlying problems.
• Manage your possible regrets. Don’t let self-reflection turn into unhealthy rumination.
• A goal built on learning is more worthy than a hard-to-attain, performance-driven goal.
• People set mutually exclusive objectives when they try to “have it all.” Goals should not be mutually, but complementary.
• An activity where you find yourself lost in concentration and happy offers clues to your abilities and potential, and gives you a good place to start forming new goals.
• “Intrinsic goals” – built around growth, relationships and autonomy – lead to greater satisfaction than “extrinsic goals” that depend on rewards and others’ approval.

Relevance

What You Will Learn

In this summary, you will learn: 1) Why you may find it hard to leave a job or life path that isn’t fulfilling, 2) How to overcome the mental blocks that can keep you from trying new paths, and 3) How “goal mapping” can help you chart a new course.

Recommendation

The human brain – which is hard-wired for persistence – and modern culture both disdain a “quitter.” However, the concept that you’ve put in too much work by now to give up can blind you to new possibilities. Peg Streep and Alan Bernstein show you how to push through those mental blocks. They detail how to use “goal mapping” to reinvent yourself, and they explain why “intrinsic goals” built around personal growth yield greater rewards than “extrinsic goals” that depend on the approval of others. The authors cite psychological experiments that explain how your brain predisposes you to persist, even when giving up is a better choice. Readers seeking practical advice will enjoy the book but will draw more insight from interviews with people who quit unfulfilling jobs and tried something new. If you have doubts about whether you’re on the right career or relationship path, getAbstract recommends this dispassionate, convincing guide to knowing when to change course. The authors speak from experience: Each quit a previous career.

Summary

Learning How to Quit

Quitting is an essential life tool, but nobody wants to be called a “quitter.” Society values persistence and celebrates heroes who reach their goals against all odds. Sometimes fear of failure keeps you going even when your goal is unrealistic. Being aware and informed and then quitting thoughtfully engages your thoughts, emotions, motivation and behavior to set you on a new path. Learning how and when to quit opens fresh opportunities for success in careers and relationships.
Set aside cultural myths like the children’s book The Little Engine That Could or the film about a valiant boxer, Rocky. Don’t perpetuate the fallacy that persistence always pays. Turn your attention to overcoming any mental obstacles that may blind you to the very real need to quit.
Through experiments, psychologists are learning more about how the human brain locks people into patterns of persistence. Be aware of these mental heuristics or mechanisms:

• Being deceived by a “near win” – In experiments, gamblers’ brains reacted almost the same way to a near win as to a win – they kept playing. Your brain reframes a loss into a near win, and that pushes you to keep trying.
• “Intermittent reinforcement” – Psychologist B.F. Skinner pioneered this concept, which applies to lab rats and to people. One hungry lab rat gets food each time it pushes a lever; another rat pushes but gets none, and a third rat also pushes but receives food only sporadically. The rats behave in predictable ways: The one that gets food only some of the time – intermittent reinforcement – proves the most persistent. People act the same way. A struggling entrepreneur who occasionally lands a good customer will stick with the enterprise even when moving on might be the best course. Someone in a difficult relationship might consider leaving, but reconsiders when his or her partner occasionally shows generosity or compassion.
• Reliance on anecdotes – This skill kept our prehistoric ancestors alive – it’s important to learn that you shouldn’t go down the path where bears ate your neighbor. But anecdotal evidence isn’t as useful in today’s complex world. You may read about lottery winners and assume you could win, too. Or you might hear about someone who achieved great success by persisting and assume that his or her experience applies to your situation.
• The “sunk-cost fallacy” – The more time, energy and money you invest in a career or relationship, the harder it is to leave. Accepting that you may have to lose what you’ve already invested is difficult. Persisting is easier.

Fear of failure tethers people to goals they should relinquish and keeps them from trying new paths. Those who desperately want to succeed have the most difficulty quitting. These obstacles are formidable and deep-seated. Simply deciding to consider quitting can mute these mental messages and make real change possible.

How Not to Quit

You can quit well or badly. To quit the right way, don’t use these counterproductive exits:

• “The slacker quit” – The dodges slouches off, refusing to stick with a viable task or giving up when the road becomes difficult.
• “The O.K. Corral” – The gunslinger on the way out postures self-righteously and frames quitting as a moral imperative and splitting as heroic, while ignoring any “collateral damage” to his or her career and relationships.
• The “faux quit” – If you leave a partner or a job and then dwell endlessly on the ups and downs you went through, you’ll never gain true disengagement.
• The “threatening quit” – This “passive-aggressive” technique mostly involves trying to manipulate other people. Consider an employee who threatens to quit to get a raise. It might work for the moment, but it damages the person’s credibility and relationships in the long term.
• The “disappearing act” – In another passive-aggressive move, a person walks away without explanation. This tactic never helps the departing staffer find a better gig.
• The “big bang” – An explosive exit makes for good drama, but leaves the quitter with “a mess to clean up.”

The Path to New Goals

Think about the moments when you have been happily lost in a task – unaware of time passing and impervious to distraction. That’s when you’ve experienced the absorption and concentration that psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously identified as “flow.” Such moments point the way to goals that are fulfilling because they’re tied to your identity. Contrary to conventional wisdom – which holds that the harder the goal, the greater the accomplishment – flow leads you to consider where you already excel and to build your goals from there.
Goals tied to who you really are – to endeavors that already bring you deep satisfaction – are effective because their rewards come from within. These “intrinsic” goals are more attainable than “extrinsic” goals that depend primarily on approval and rewards from other people. The lure of a performance bonus may help you meet a short-term goal, but objectives tied to activities that generate flow are better for the long term. Ask yourself how you could structure your goals to experience flow more often?
Consider the difference between “approach” goals and “avoidance” goals. Both objectives may aim for the same outcome, but the way you frame them makes all the difference. Someone who wants to feel less isolated and more connected to others might frame that wish as an avoidance goal – don’t be lonely – or an approach goal – strengthen ties with other people. Research shows that approach goals lead to more satisfaction.

How High the Bar?

Tying a goal to personal growth and learning is better than targeting a specific accomplishment. This runs counter to conventional wisdom, which says a hard-to-reach “performance goal” inspires you to keep trying harder. In reality, such goals lead to frustration and even disaster.
The most famous example is the Ford Pinto. In the 1960’s, Lee Iacocca, then president of Ford, proclaimed that the company would create a compact car, “under 2000 pounds” and costing less than $2,000, and move it quickly to market. Time pressures prompted managers to take shortcuts, even when tests showed the car could easily catch fire in an accident. Ford’s leaders decided lawsuits were worth the risk if accepting that hazard meant getting the car to market on time.
The Pinto story underscores the pitfalls of setting ambitious performance goals with a time limit, especially in a business setting. Such goals can encourage people to take unacceptable risks, even lie and cheat, to meet the goal – and intrinsic motivation takes a back seat.
In setting your goals, don’t create performance benchmarks like “become a partner in my firm within five years.” Focus instead on how to make your goal happen. If you want to make partner in five years, ask yourself: What skills do I need to master? What strategies should I adopt? Build “learning goals” around those concepts to position yourself more productively than you could with performance goals alone.

A Matter of Mental Mapping

Writing down goals helps you assess how they relate to each other and whether your efforts to meet them are bearing fruit. This can clarify whether you need to stay with a goal or try something else.
In “goal mapping,” you make two vertical columns – one each for short- and long-term goals – and create horizontal rows for goals in several categories. These can be “life goals,” “career goals,” “relationship goals,” “learning and achievement goals” or other categories that relate to your life. Define “short-term” and “long-term” any way you like.
Goal mapping helps you identify goals that oppose each other – such as achieving great success in a high-pressure, time-consuming job, while being a full-time “hands-on parent.” Write any conflicting goals in a separate spot on your goal map and label them “conflict.” Evaluate your goals with a three-part exercise:

1. Write down a vision of your “ideal future” – Imagine your personal life, your career, where you want to live and where you would direct your energies.
2. Rank your goals by importance – Include any conflicting goals. Drop any that you decide don’t belong.
3. Write about each goal – Describe how attaining each goal will improve your life. Read what you wrote about your ideal future and consider if attaining your goals will get you there. Revise your goals as necessary.

Are your goals attainable? What obstacles will you encounter and how will you respond? You can find the answer through “mental contrasting.” Imagine that you have a short-term goal of doing an excellent job on a sales presentation. You might be tempted to imagine that you do it brilliantly and that nothing goes wrong. Or you might envision losing your train of thought and botching it. Mental contrasting grounds you in reality. It prompts you to consider what might go wrong and how you might successfully respond: “If X happens, then I will do Y.”
Contrary to the story of The Little Engine That Could, the best motivation doesn’t come from telling yourself “I think I can,” or even “I will.” In experiments, people achieved the greatest success at solving an anagram when they phrased their motivation as a question: “Will I?” Casting the idea as a question prompts you to call up all the intrinsic reasons why you want to meet the goal – and that boosts your motivation.

Managing Regret

Regret is a natural byproduct whenever you abandon an old goal or don’t meet a new one. In the short term, people are more apt to regret actions they have taken. In the long term, they’re more likely to regret what they didn’t do. To succeed at quitting and move boldly to new goals, anticipate your likely regrets.
You can’t prevent regrets, but you can learn from them by using “counterfactual thinking,” a systematic, constructive way to think about what might have been. To use “upward counterfactual thinking,” consider how an outcome might have turned out better. Say you were passed over for a promotion. Imagine what would have led to a better outcome – what could you have done to gain the job? This gives you information to enlighten future goals and choices.
In “downward counterfactual thinking,” you imagine worse outcomes. While you missed out on the promotion, other people were laid off. You’re better off than they are; that helps you see your loss in context.
Regrets over quitting can spur you to ruminate – to reconsider your decisions in an endless loop. This blocks movement toward your new goals. Manage rumination by confining it to a “worry time,” by recording your thoughts in a journal or by training your mind to focus on an unrelated distraction, such as the petals of a flower.
You don’t have to go it alone. The act of quitting – whether you drop a short-term goal or abandon a major life path – and of turning your attention to new goals need not be solitary. Seek advice and accept support for the journey.

About the Authors

Peg Streep wrote Necessary Journeys in cooperation with Dr. Nancy L. Snyderman. She also has written nine other books. Clinical social worker Alan Bernstein, author of The Princeton Review’s Guide to Your Career, has been a faculty member at New York Medical College and New York University.

Quotes

• “Artful quitting...involves letting go of the familiar, staking out new territory, living through a period of ambiguity, and dealing with the emotional fallout of letting go of something important.”
• “If quitting isn’t accompanied by engagement with new goals, it’s not an answer at all.”
• “Successful and satisfied people know both how to persist and how to quit.”
• “The hardest goals to quit are those that look successful on the surface but leave us feeling dead or soulless or make us unhappy in other ways.”
• “While goals give our lives meaning and structure, it is rare that any of us will achieve all of them. Disappointment and regrouping are part of everyone’s life script.”
• “If you’re not sure that the goal you’ve set is actually attainable, set some interim deadlines for yourself so that you can monitor your progress.”
• “The common wisdom about a hard-to-reach goal being inspirational simply isn’t true.”
• “Quitting sometimes requires a huge leap of faith – imagining an as-yet unrealized future – and a willingness to take on the possibility of failure, along with [its]...emotional fallout.”
• “Quitting is, inevitably, part of the life cycle, easier at some stages and harder at others.”
• “If we are hell-bent on having it all, each of us needs to take a look at our goals in relation to each other, not as single, unrelated items on a wish or to-do list.”
• “Sometimes, persistence is only the path of least resistance.”
• “The only way to reset new goals and open up new possibilities is to let go of old goals entirely.”
• “If reaching our goals doesn’t make us happy, what does? It’s whether our goals reflect the self.”
• “Persistence is hardwired in the human species; what needs to be learned is discernment, knowing which goals are worthy of effort and meaningful.”