The Art of Quitting
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The Art of Quitting
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Re: The Art of Quitting
#2"It's not giving up, it's disengagement."
If you set out to do something and stop doing it before you've succeeded, even though you could carry on with at least some possibility of further and future success, calling it anything other than "giving up" is just sugar-coating it.
I'm sure it's sensible and wise to give up in many circumstances, but giving it a fancy name really shouldn't be part of the process of justifying that decision.
Re: The Art of Quitting
#3"It's not giving up, it's disengagement." If you set out to do something and stop doing it before you've succeeded, even though you could carry on with at least some possibility of further and future success, calling it anything other than "giving up" is just sugar-coating it. I'm sure it's sensible and wise to give up in many circumstances, but giving it a fancy name really shouldn't be part of the process of justif…
The quoted sentence is the summation of an article trying to distinguish between quitting because you can't do it, and quitting because you no longer care. Focusing on the renaming aspect is taking it too literally; that's just a rhetorical device.
Re: The Art of Quitting
#4I feel this.
I spent 20 years building a successful career as an enterprise software engineer, bouncing around between configuration management, development, and ops. It's a secure, good paying, stable career. And I grew to resent and sometimes hate it.
Then I started building something for myself, discovered the idea of creating my own startup to solve problems I experienced doing enterprise software projects in a general way, and I love that. It makes me feel like I'm doing something that actually matters.
Right now, I'm back in the enterprise to make ends meet and building on the side, which sucks and drives me crazy - but at least I see the exit and can keep moving toward it. And I figure I can get five or ten years out of building a company before I'm done with that as well.
Once you hit a certain age and a certain level of success, the things you realize you'll never do weigh on you more than the things you haven't done yet. And the things you do look more like impediments than accomplishments. That's when you need to change.
Re: The Art of Quitting
#5Why the assumption that Ellen Pao was not fired? It felt like one of these cases when an employee has a lengthy talk with her supervisors, after which she is given an option to quit, as a way to save her face.
An evidence for that would be how fast was a new interim CEO found after the previous one "quit".
Re: The Art of Quitting
#6"It's not giving up, it's disengagement." If you set out to do something and stop doing it before you've succeeded, even though you could carry on with at least some possibility of further and future success, calling it anything other than "giving up" is just sugar-coating it. I'm sure it's sensible and wise to give up in many circumstances, but giving it a fancy name really shouldn't be part of the process of justif…
The quoted sentence is the summation of an article trying to distinguish between quitting because you can't do it, and quitting because you no longer care. Focusing on the renaming aspect is taking it too literally; that's just a rhetorical device.
Wholeheartedly agree. It may just seem like it's sugarcoating it, but there is definitely a difference in changing focus and just giving up. Saying something other than, "I just gave up on it," (which is what quit generally implies) gives more a story behind why.
Side projects come to mind when I think of quitting. Sometimes the project becomes much bigger than what you expected. You and your buddy don't have the time nor resources to dedicate towards seeing it through or scaling it up. It really all depends on the situation.
Re: The Art of Quitting
#7I feel this. I spent 20 years building a successful career as an enterprise software engineer, bouncing around between configuration management, development, and ops. It's a secure, good paying, stable career. And I grew to resent and sometimes hate it. Then I started building something for myself, discovered the idea of creating my own startup to solve problems I experienced doing enterprise software projects in a g…
Good luck. Tell us more about your startup someday.
Re: The Art of Quitting
#8The Art of Blogspam:
1. Put sort-of related recent news item in first paragraph to seem timely
2. Rehash old content
3. Close with sort-of related recent news item in last paragraph
4. Add clickbait headline
Re: The Art of Quitting
#9I'm not sure what to make of this blog post. The author writes:
>By resigning from Reddit,
Behind the scenes, Ellen Pao could have been forced out (also known as being "fired") but presented publicly as a resignation. I thought we don't really know what happened? Therefore, it seems biased to frame a thematic essay about "quitting" around Ellen's circumstances. If she didn't voluntarily separate, it's not "quitting" -- it's getting fired. Does the author Ernie Smith know the inside details of Ellen Pao's situation that we don't?
>Ellen Pao is choosing to focus her attention on the other things that interest her.
The underlying Washington Post article that this sentence links to is ~900 words written by Ellen Pao. She makes no mention of "other things that interest her."
Overall, a blog post of dubious quality.
Re: The Art of Quitting
#10Why the assumption that Ellen Pao was not fired? It felt like one of these cases when an employee has a lengthy talk with her supervisors, after which she is given an option to quit, as a way to save her face. An evidence for that would be how fast was a new interim CEO found after the previous one "quit".
The example of Ellen Pao was merely a way to start the conversation. That specific example does not diminish the message of the piece which I find very insightful.