Quitting: Why We Fear It—and Why We Shouldn't—in Life, Love, and Work
Alan Bernstein, Peg Streep
Language: English
Pages: 251
ISBN: 2:00357485
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Find out why the happiest, most successful people have the ability both to persist and to quit
Do you believe that "winners never quit and quitters never win"? Do you tend to hang in longer than you should, even when you're unhappy? Our culture usually defines quitting as admitting defeat, but persistence isn't always the answer: When a goal is no longer useful, we need to be able to quit to get the most out of life. In Quitting, bestselling author Peg Streep and psychotherapist Alan Bernstein reveal simple truths that apply to goal setting and achievement in all areas of life, including work, love, and relationships:
Without the ability to give up, most people will end up in a discouraging loop.
Quitting is a healthy, adaptive response when a goal can't be reached.
Quitting permits growth and learning, as well as the ability to frame new goals.
Featuring compelling stories of people who successfully quit, along with helpful questionnaires and goal maps to guide you on the right path, Quitting will help you evaluate whether your goals are working for or against you, and whether you need to let go in order to start anew.
others, the more difficult it may be to find the right time to quit a relationship, job, or career path. In addition, the time may be right for you, but not for the other people in your life. Quitting is easier at certain stages of life—young adulthood, for example—than it is at others, both because there’s less cultural disapproval and there are usually fewer real-life complications. The risks of starting a new business or any other entrepreneurial activity are more easily tolerated early in
stage of life takes on a different complexity, not simply because of personal obligations but because long-held goals and perhaps a diminishing sense of what’s possible may also come into play. But that said, once you understand your own talent for quitting (or the lack of it), the habits of mind that are keeping you in place, and your ability to assess and prioritize your own goals, the question of timing will become clearer to you. You’ll know and feel with some certainty when the time is
emotions This part of the theory acknowledges that emotional knowledge very much depends on our ability to know precisely what we’re feeling when we’re feeling it. Sometimes, we can label an emotion with relative ease because the situation is comparatively simple and the cause and the emotional effect are easy to see. For example, our friend moves away or our cat dies and we are sad; we are afraid that we’ll miss the deadline for our project because we’re running very late; we’re angry because
than decisions that are inherently consistent with how you think and behave. All of this makes eminent sense. If you are normally a cautious person, an impromptu decision that turns out badly will be regretted more, with a healthy dose of self-blame, than one on which you did your usual due diligence but tanked nonetheless. Because regret is considered an aversive emotion (it doesn’t feel good), human beings are presumed to be motivated to try to regulate it. As you might expect, then,
183–184 and stress, 99, 102 Counterfactual thinking, 179, 186, 187–188 and downward counterfactual thinking, 187 and regret, 187, 188 and upward counterfactual thinking, 187 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 160, 161–162, 195–196 Deci, Edward L., 45, 46 Decision justification theory, 183 Decision making and conscious goals, 147 and ego depletion, 55–56 and emotional intelligence, 110–112 Deliberative mind-set, 202–203, 205 Delusional optimism, 21. See also Optimism Depression, 59–60 and