Should you quit your job?

Most people have a somehow funny relationship with quitting. It is seen as a sign that you’re weak, that you won’t ever win, that you are a coward.

Therefore, they have a hard time thinking about quitting — while it shouldn’t be.

Some people even make elaborate statements as to why they shouldn’t quit even though they don’t like their jobs, colleagues, working cultures, etc. Things like “I’ve only been here for x weeks / months, I’d rather stick around a little bit more — you never know” or “I’m not sure how it will be in another company”.

The truth is there’s 2 kinds of quitting:
(1) Quitting for the wrong reasons
(2) Quitting for the right reasons

Yet people put “quitting” in the “loser” bucket no matter what.

Winners do quit, they just quit for the right reasons. In fact, you might lose not because there’s too much competition, but because you stick to a path that leads to a dead-end. Kodak forgot to quit the analog photography business when it was time to focus on the digital one.

Example of quitting for the wrong reason: giving up when things get hard, although overcoming the hurdle would move you closer to your goal.

Examples of quitting for the right reasons: you have reached a ceiling in your company and can’t grow pass the ceiling for political / organizational reasons, or you feel depleted from your energy by going to work more than feeling energized by it.

So quitting is not losing.

People romanticize the fact that Edison famously had to try over 10,000 times before he succeeded. Indeed, he “never quit”.

What people don’t say is that he probably had to quit thousands of other experiments in order to focus on the ones that made him famous.

So how do you know if you should quit or not?

Here’s a quick trick. Ask yourself:
(1) Is sticking to it going to take you closer to your goal, or further away? (stagnation counts as “further away”)

If the answer is “further away”, then go find something that will make you move closer to your goal. Why stick around when you’re in a dead end? Don’t be like Kodak, please.

If the answer is “closer”, then the second question is:
(2) Have I used up all the potential this company had to offer for me to move closer to my goal?

If the answer is “Yes”, then there’s nothing much to add to it. Move on.

If it’s “Not yet”, then what are you willing to do to leverage your current job in order to move closer to your goal?

It doesn’t get more complicated than that. Of course, emotionally you might be attached to your colleagues, company, etc. which only makes it harder for you to think logically.

Which is why you need to come back to your goal. What do you really want?

Without personal goals, the sad truth is that you’ll lose by default.