Twelve weeks ago I quit a job where I was on track to reach the pinnacle of my earning potential, leaving behind an influential role with a title that rang of corporate success. When it finally became clear to me that quitting was the next right thing to do, I did not tell people I quit. I used different words and phrases like, stepping down, finding my way back to clinical leadership, and taking a sabbatical. Despite using different language, the heaviness of quitting and what it would mean for my career prospects in a culture of competition and striving at all costs to achieve upward mobility weighed heavily on my spirit. As I listened to my repeated narrative in those final weeks, “quit” was absent from my vocabulary. It felt too final.
While quitting may feel final, it is also courageous. Images and scenes from television and film sensationalize the courageous act of quitting work that no longer serves us. In the 1976 film Network the character Howard Beale tells us all to go to the window and declare with him, “I’m Mad as Hell and I’m not going to Take it Anymore!”. Consider the 1999 Mike Judge film Office Space, where the protagonist Peter stops caring about his meaningless job after a hypnotherapy session and actively decides to “just not go anymore”. He doesn’t quit per-se, rather he engages in a series of acts now defined a “quiet quitting”, including an act of brutality against a fax machine, symbolic of a collective animus toward systems that destroy creativity and independence through multiple layers of micromanaging managers berating workers about using the correct cover sheets on their TPS reports.
There is good reason why these scenes resonate with people providing temporary comic relief from a grim reality that many people face in the workplace. In 2021 the Workplace Bullying Institute conducted a survey that estimated as many as 30% of workers experience abusive conduct, 13% witness it, 49% are affected by it, and 66% are aware of it. https://workplacebullying.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/1.-Prev.pdf. Abuse can take many forms from overt favoritism and outright public shaming to the more insidious forms of silencing and diminishing. Like the character Milton in Office Space, It’s no wonder we cling to our red staplers when we have little control over our working conditions.
On the flip side, our workplaces do provide us with a lot of positives. Given the lack of social programs in the U.S. compared to other economically developed nations, the modern American workplace has become a de-facto social savior. We pay lower taxes, but our employers pick up the rest. Workplaces provide many social benefits including health insurance, education funding, retirement savings, life insurance, legal support, mental health counseling through employee assistance programs not covered by insurance, and even affordable childcare. However, these noble investments in the well-being of employees can also serve as golden handcuffs keeping people tethered to their jobs even when quitting becomes the next right thing to do.
In her book Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Annie Duke bravely challenges us to embrace quitting as a critical tool in a world where we must make decisions with incomplete information. Annie Duke writes, “At the moment that quitting becomes the objectively best choice, in practice things generally won’t look particularly grim, even though the present does contain clues that can help you figure out how the future might unfold. The problem is, perhaps because of our aversion to quitting, we tend to rationalize away the clues contained in the present that would allow us to see how bad things really are.” When quitting was objectively the best choice for me, I had already rationalized away clues for the greater part of a year. Ms. Duke has inspired me to define my own “quit criteria” so that I no longer perceive “Quit” as a four-letter word.
Annie Duke’s wisdom contradicts our natural inclination to believe “quitters never win”. “Contrary to popular belief, winners quit a lot. That’s how they win.” Reframing “Quit” and honoring Quit and Grit as interdependent forces allowed me the space to try something new and courageous, while simultaneously holding the option to walk away before I was too deep in the losses. Establishing quit criteria meant articulating my values, setting boundaries, defining data points to serve as quit beacons, and paying attention to new data telling me that circumstances had changed relative to the information I had when I said “yes”.
Twelve weeks into my sabbatical I have learned there is no quit without grit. After a decade of healthcare leadership and twenty years as a nurse, it feels like I am starting over, only I no longer have a job through which to demonstrate my value. The color-coded dashboard I maintain to track progress with my job hunt is mostly red, with spots of green ending with a red outcome. The resilience I am building through rejection is a new skill I did not expect to sharpen to this degree, but I also trust I will find my way back to meaningful work again. What I will say I know for sure, do not underestimate the grit you will need if you muster the courage to quit. You will need it!
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