The Importance of Quitting

Quitting is a stigmatized word. Whether your leaving a job or a Intramural basketball team, quitting is often used and thought of as a synonym for failure. The reality however, is that quitting and knowing when to quit is a quintessential skill for any leader. The naysayers will feed you quote after quote from some of the most successful minds in your industry on why you should never quit, why you should keep at it, and why when the going gets tough, the tough get going. The truth is, it’s bullshit. There is a time to quit and it’s important to know when.

“People automatically associate quitting with failure, but sometimes that’s exactly what you should do. If you already spent too much time on something that wasn’t worth it, walk away. You can’t get that time back. The worst thing you can do now is waste even more time.” -REWORK, Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson

A while back, I started a company called Booktab.org, the website was my attempt to fill what I thought was a niche market of people looking to keep track of and talk about the books they read. I did a bit of research but admittedly not enough. I focused on the programing, working day in and day out. Fellow avid reader Matt D’Avella joined as a Partner and we discussed ways to improve functionality and how to scale the idea. A lot of time and energy was put into the website and it was still far from complete. That’s when we came across Goodreads.com, it was better in every way. It had better functionality, aesthetics, usability, and impressive user counts. We thought about competing, nothing drives innovation like a strong competitor, but Goodreads had us beat. We were building something that already existed, so we abandoned ship before we wasted anymore time. If you’re not going to make it better, don’t build it at all. We had other ideas and Goodreads.com was well on their way to creating something amazing.

Don’t reinvent the wheel, upgrade it. If you can’t upgrade it, quit.