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The Art of Quitting

atlasobscura.com

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Re: The Art of Quitting

#11

Post by derplederple »

bshimmin wrote: post #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 justif…

I live in a world where people have the capacity to make more informed decisions as time moves forward and they gather more information about both the world and their own self. That is, people know themselves better at a later point in time than they did before (but it is entirely possible these reverse) and they have a different set of options because the overall state of the world tends to vary with time.

If you make a goal at time t1 and decide at t2 that that goal was a hasty and thoughtless goal, then I think the person you are at t2 should be the person you evaluate yourself as, rather than clinging to statements you might have uttered in the past. Black and white thinking of "success / failure" is a good way to make sure everything in your life goes exactly as planned, while wearing blinders. You need a combination of both in order to really be successful.

Being mean to yourself doesn't necessarily lead to success. If you've only got a mile left in the marathon and you've already ran 25, yes, that extra mile is kind of important, but also, no, it really isn't.

Re: The Art of Quitting

#12

Post by at-fates-hands »

The examples in the article are really poor examples for a number of reasons.

First of all, Jordan didn't "quit" to go play baseball. He had already won three championships and had already done pretty much anybody at that level could do. He wasn't "begging for a new direction" either. He always wanted to play baseball and wanted to fulfill a childhood dream is all. After doing so (no matter how bad he was) he went back to basketball and achieved even more when he came back. No exactly someone who quit and stayed away.

If you actually read the Jordan Price article, it talks about the boss he had and the psychological abuse he was taking. Sure he was at his "dream job" but the jokes and insults from his negative boss drove him to quit. It wasn't really his choice to quit, it was more he was driven out by an his boss who was a douchebag.

And the Ellen Poe situation? Quitting is completely different than being set up to fail. Again, using her as an example of "goal disengagement" completely misunderstands her whole situation. She was set up to fail, then driven into submission by the inmates who are running the asylum at Reddit.

If you want to use a better example, try Robert Smith, the running back for the Vikings who abruptly quit after a career year in the NFL. He was about to get a huge contract extension, but he gave up the money so he could pursue a career in medicine. He also wanted to get out of the NFL without any lingering physical issues. He still appears on some NFL and college football shows, but for the most part lives a pretty private life post NFL career.

Re: The Art of Quitting

#13

Post by mgalka »

jasode wrote: post #9

I'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"…

Agree.

I think it is actually a good post, and I agree with it conceptually. But I don't think it has anything to do with Pao's resignation.

Re: The Art of Quitting

#14

Post by Facemelters »

jasode wrote: post #9

I'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"…

Who's making assumptions now? The ONLY hard facts we have are what they announced: A mutual separation. Why are you so sure it was a firing?

I think it's a relatively reasonable logical conclusion that Ms. Pao, freed from responsibilities at Reddit, is pursuing things that interest her. Are you saying that she's most likely pursuing things that DON'T interest her? The 900-word essay seems to set out a thesis or mission statement for what she might do now...

Re: The Art of Quitting

#15

Post by ritchiea »

It would be really nice to talk about leaving a job, seeing your goals and expectations change, or finding yourself in a position that previously seemed like a "dream job" only to find yourself not as fulfilled as you expected. Rather than fixating on the specific example of Ellen Pao. The piece is about an experience that many people face not about Ellen Pao.

Re: The Art of Quitting

#16

Post by zallarak »

There are 2 sides to this.

1. Quit: I spent a summer in investment banking, at a prestigious bank after 2 years of hustling at a state school (way easier to get this type of job at an ivy league). I left after a summer despite loving the people and perks -- it wasn't for me.

2. Persevere: While learning computer programming, it was rough to start from scratch. Seeing how slow I was compared to others was discouraging, but I pushed through and now love what I do/the skills I have. I recall taking a graduate level computer systems course, while working full-time, which was fairly challenging for me at the time (this course required writing and debugging assembly, writing programs like malloc from scratch, etc. with no other formal CS background). It was 100% worth it!

Perhaps the lesson here is that learning at the early stages is tedious, and one should push through. Or that you should have a motivator that isn't financial in taking on something tough.

Re: The Art of Quitting

#17

Post by acqq »

jasode wrote: post #9

I'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"…

Also note that atlasobscura is a site which tries hard to make a content which is dangerously close to the blogspam (the supposed topic of the site is still according to their about page "the definitive guide to the world's wondrous and curious places" and according to their tags "Travel tips, articles, strange facts and unique events.") and that user rshrsh only exists here to post the links to the atlasobscura articles.

And privong notes here: "the mentions of Pao seemed very out of place" and 300bps also explains: "The Art of Blogspam: Put sort-of related recent news item in first paragraph to seem timely." I think the conclusion is obvious.

Re: The Art of Quitting

#18

Post by myth_buster »

jasode wrote: post #9

I'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"…

Ellen Pao was one of the examples. There are many other examples mentioned which the author uses to support their argument which is not whether Ellen Pao quit to pursue other interests but

  Everyone should quit something that really matters to them, at 
  least once. We all need to feel what it’s like on the other side 
  of a big success story. Only then will we all understand that 
  quitting isn’t "giving up," but setting the stage for something 
  else.

Re: The Art of Quitting

#19

Post by beat »

nextos wrote: post #7
beat wrote: post #4

I 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.

I'll be back with a "Show HN" once I get the beta running. I took several months last year to work on it full-time and got an alpha version working, which taught me a ton of things I didn't know I didn't know about the problem I'm tackling. Now, I'm working on a beta based on lessons learned from the alpha.

The product is a way to answer the simple yet awful question, "What changed?" Configuration change is the primary cause of failure in complex software systems. But the part that breaks isn't necessarily the part that changes. For example, a database schema change can break apps that rely on the database. But in large organizations, where the database is administrated by an entirely different team from app development and developers may not even be allowed to look at the production environment, it's a huge pain point.

Detecting configuration change and finding the relationships and impact is a really difficult and challenging problem. The biggest takeaway from the alpha for me was that "noise shaping" is a hard problem. For example, Wordpress alters the schema of its MySQL database several times a day. It's a tiny thing (an autoincrement value on a single column), but it makes sorting important changes like upgrades that only happen weekly or monthly or yearly from unimportant changes that happen daily.

The trick now is to get a product out of it good enough to make money, so I can afford to quit dayjobbing and live off my own creation, rather than sitting at someone else's desk and counting the number of times a day I wish I had my own product here to help solve the problems I deal with over and over, every damned day.

Re: The Art of Quitting

#20

Post by a_shane »

zallarak wrote: post #16

There are 2 sides to this. 1. Quit: I spent a summer in investment banking, at a prestigious bank after 2 years of hustling at a state school (way easier to get this type of job at an ivy league). I left after a summer despite loving the people and perks -- it wasn't for me. 2. Persevere: While learning computer programming, it was rough to start from scratch. Seeing how slow I was compared to others was discouraging…

It seems like a recurring theme in these types of posts is that people leave high-paying jobs and that we should applaud them for "giving up" their salaries to do what makes them happy.

Not that this is a bad thing (I applaud anyone who does something difficult in the pursuit of long-term happiness), but the fact that many people enter into unfulfilling job situations because they're drawn to the high profile and/or salary probably plays a large part in why they feel unfulfilled after working there for a while.

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