By Bettina Tan
Conventional wisdom holds that the higher echelons of any industry are populated by people who never quit. But writer and designer Sarah Kathleen Peck suggests that quitting is not only OK, it can be richly constructive.
In a post on Medium, Peck describes what she learned from observing her enduring pattern of enthusiastically starting projects, pausing partway through, and beating herself up for failing to ship:
What was happening? Why was I quitting? Life happened. Things got hard, they got rough: deadlines built up. Real work pulled me in. The need to take a run and take care of my body surfaced. The competing pulls of attention and focus and deadlines wrapped me in their compelling arms. But something else was happening, too. Ten days of paper-crafting…led me to building an entirely new online program of my own.
Skimming the lessons in a business-building mastermind opened up a new way of creating sales pages. Reading half of a book propelled me into my next project. And then it hit me: what if I was getting exactly what I needed?
The idea is that quitting can beneficially lead to embarking on a different project that’s informed and nourished by the abandoned one. Peck suggests that it’s possible the ego is the only part of ourselves that actually cares about finishing, at least when it comes to exploratory creative work:
You don’t have to do everything to get something out of it…. No one said you have to get 100% done and be perfect to enjoy the fruits of your progress.
If you’re working on something that’s not beholden to someone else’s deadline or parameters, don’t finish for the sake of finishing. Quit to see what space you’ve opened up for something even greater.
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