Daniel Lazar M.B.A., M.A., AMFT

Giving up takes strength, wisdom, and foresight. We just don’t know it yet.

Key points

• Giving up isn’t weakness.
• It takes strength, wisdom, and foresight to let go.
• Knowing this may help you make better decisions.

I thought about quitting this blog post halfway through.

I came into it feeling pretty good. I’m a solid writer and the piece would be only a few hundred words. I figured it wouldn’t take more than a half-day. Piece of cake.

It took me five weeks.

I couldn’t get it right. Draft after draft was more stilted and meandering than the last, and the harder I worked, the worse it got. It was maddening.

A few weeks in, I decided to quit. Then, in that same instant, I overrode myself. I kept going without even thinking about it.

I had taken this impulsive stutter-step before. In my mind, giving up would have been shameful, even sinful, a failure of my moral self. That’s what the world taught me: People who quit are “quitters,” paragons of weakness, traitors of the American spirit.

Winners never quit and quitters never win. That sort of thing.

But lately I’ve been wondering if I had it wrong.

Maybe quitting isn’t failure. Maybe it’s just misunderstood.

The thought occurred to me recently, when I stumbled upon a video about boxer Andrew Golota’s infamous loss to fighter Mike Tyson on Oct. 20, 2000.

Tyson, arguably the most dangerous fighter in history, pummeled Golota in the first round.

Just one round later, Golota had had enough.

He quit.

The arena erupted in protest. His trainers screamed at him, the crowd pelted him with garbage, and the media raked him. Boxing officials revoked his $2 million purse. Security escorted him from the arena for his own safety.

Then, the next day, the plot thickened.

The world learned that, in just the first three minutes of the fight, Golota had suffered a fractured cheek bone, concussion, and herniated disk. Those are serious injuries. It didn’t take a doctor to know another round might have killed him.

Turns out Golota wasn’t weak for quitting. He was wise.

The news made it clear that the crowd’s relationship with quitting had gotten the best of them. They leaned into the hoariest tropes about quitting. They debased Golota’s nuanced decision with simplistic, black-and-white reasoning. They willfully spun unfair and unkind narratives about him. And they packaged this toxicity with a tidy label: “quitter.”

It was bias en mass and in vivo.

And that’s what got me questioning my decision not to quit.

Did my own bias get the best of me, too?

I’m beginning to think so.

For one, I fooled myself.

I pretended I was strong for not quitting the blog and leaning into the challenge. Perseverance meant commitment, focus, and resolve. It was the honorable choice.

I now know strength had nothing to do with it. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In truth, I was simply afraid.

To my biased mind, giving up would have meant failure, and I don’t do well with that kind of pain. But burying myself in the post, however useless the effort, kept that prospect behind me. I was tricking myself into feeling safe, and the harder I worked the safer I felt.

That’s not perseverance. It’s retreat. I was running from shame.

I fooled myself another way.

I told myself I was wise for not quitting the post. I had invested so much of myself in it that it seemed silly to turn back now. I didn’t want all my work to go to waste.

Nonsense.

My prior work no longer mattered at that point. The time, sweat, and tears were gone forever, unrecoverable costs that had no bearing on my choice to quit or not. But I continued with my futile efforts anyway, like I was throwing good money after bad.

That’s not perseverance. It’s foolishness.

My bias against quitting hurt me in another way.

I missed out on better choices.

Perseverance is an opportunity cost. By shackling myself to the post, I spent countless hours not exploring other opportunities. I stuck to one option only. I fenced myself in.

Quitting works in reverse. Had I given up, all options would have been on the table. That includes the possibility of a better, less painful blog post idea.

That’s why quitting isn’t a terminus. It’s a pivot into something else, one of many that shape our lives.

I think all these learnings point to a simple fact.

Quitting and perseverance live in the gray. They’re both pregnant with strength and weakness, wisdom and foolishness, foresight and myopia. This is why the “quitter” label is ridiculous. It’s a black-and-white take on a decision that lives in the gray.

Knowing this can lead to better decisions.

I like to think I’ll explore this gray area the next time I want to quit, but there’s no guarantee. I may not have the strength and wisdom to override my bias. But if I can go toe-to-toe with it for a few rounds, that’s something. Bias punches back, but it’s not unbeatable.

Just ask Golota.