Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - The Science of Quitting: How, When, and Why to Do It | Julia Keller

Episode Date: January 31, 2024

Sometimes perseverance is overrated. An argument for strategic quitting.Julia Keller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, novelist, and playwright. She has a Ph.D. in English Literature from The Ohio State University and has taught at Princeton University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Notre Dame, and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She was the chief book critic at The Chicago Tribune for many years before quitting the world of daily journalism to write books. In this episode we talk about:The history behind why quitting gets such a bad rap What happens in our brains when we quit Why we don’t give enough credit to quittingThe myth of perseverance How to talk to our children about healthy quittingThe power of having a community of quittersRelated Episodes:The Myth of the Dream Job | Simone StolzoffHow To Find Meaningful Work in a Rapidly Changing World | Bruce FeilerSign up for Dan’s weekly newsletter hereFollow Dan on social: Instagram, TikTokTen Percent Happier online bookstoreSubscribe to our YouTube ChannelOur favorite playlists on: Anxiety, Sleep, Relationships, Most Popular EpisodesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/julia-kellerAdditional Resources:Download the Ten Percent Happier app today: https://10percenthappier.app.link/installSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, gang. We live in a culture that valorizes and lionizes grit, perseverance, and stick-to-itiveness. And yes, of course, sometimes those things are great, but my guest today argues quite convincingly in my opinion that often quitting is the wisest path. And she's got a lot of research to back this up. Julia Keller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, novelist, and playwright.

She's taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago She was the chief book critic at the Chicago Tribune for many years before she quit Daily journalism to write books and the book she wrote about quitting which is going to be the subject of our conversation today is called quitting a life strategy in this conversation We talked about the history behind why quitting gets such a bad rap, what happens in our brains when we quit, the myth of perseverance, that's her phrase, how to talk to your children about healthy quitting, and the power of having a community of quitters. This episode is the latest installment of an occasional series we do called Sainly Ambitious.

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Follow Legacy Now wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge entire seasons of Legacy ad free on Amazon Music or by subscribing to Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery app. Julia Keller, welcome to the show. Oh, thanks so much. It's a great pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you.

Well, let me start with some foundational question. Like, whence your interest in quitting? Wow, how did that become a salient issue for you? You know, it has started kind of gradually. I think if people look at my life, just because I've done a lot of kind of different things and they would not think that I would be someone who would be pro quitting, I would seem to be the opposite.

Because I'm a big sports fan, of course, we love to talk about resilience and sports, comeback stories are always just so enchanting to us. And yet I began to think, you know, a few years rolled on in my life, that quitting really is at the very nexus of human endeavor. It really defines who we are. It's this idea of the fresh start in the second chance. I became just as enamored of that idea as I always was with the idea of resilience.

And for me, and I talk about in my book a little bit, this incident when I was 19 years old and I went to grad school, and it was terrible. It was a dreadful experience, and I quit. And it was only in looking back, I mean, grad school and it was terrible. It was a dreadful experience and I quit. It was only in looking back, I mean maybe all wisdom lies in retrospect. It was only in looking back that I realized what a pivotal moment that was when I had to fight

through my shame at having quit something. I was regarded as like pretty smart kid. So there you go, at grad school at earlier age than most I graduated from college earlier. I thought, what would this mean? Maybe I'm a big dope. It was that great fear of letting other people down and letting myself down that I had to fight through.

But I did, but things worked out okay. And when I looked back at that, I thought, so why is it that we endowed the idea of quitting with such shame, almost a kind of a moral failing? We equate sticking with things to virtue. And it was that idea that really kind of set me off in this quest to explore this curious world of quitting. Why do we look upon someone who quit something, who chooses one path over another as a loser,

as a whiner, as a crybaby? Whereas we, people who stick with things, even if it's the wrong thing, we heap all of these accolades on them. We say, look at that, she's stuck with it. She's a winner. I just found that to be utterly curious. In looking at it, I found a lot of

cultural antecedents for that, a lot of historical things that were of great interest to me. Then I discovered that from a neuroscience perspective, there's all kinds of new research on what quitting really means, what happens when we quit in our brains.

And to me, it just seemed utterly fascinating. And as I said, just at the heart of so much of human endeavor is quitting. Is there no virtue in perseverance? Oh, of course there is, of course there is. Yes, yes, in fact, I always stipulate that right at the outset, of course there is. Of course there is. Yes. Yes. In fact, I always stipulate that right at the outset. Of course there is. But what I object to is the idea that it is the only good that you must persevere or else you're all those other bad things that I mentioned. It's the

idea that we have that flexibility, that cognitive flexibility gives us this ability to decide when it is indeed time to quit. But we don't do that. We resist because we're afraid of being called a quitter, which is a worst possible thing. I mean, think back to when you were a kid, playing baseball or anything you might be doing. If you quit to be called a quitter was absolutely the worst possible insult. There was no worse insult.

And there still is no worse insult. We call people quitters all the time when often they've just made other decisions. Of course, sometimes we do need to stay the course and there's nothing wrong with kind of gritting your teeth and saying, I'm gonna power through this. However, if you do decide to quit, it doesn't mean you're a bad person.

I guess there's a question about like, how do you know when the time is right to grit your teeth? And then how do you know when the time is right to quit? Indeed, and that is the art. That is the art of it. I mean, it isn't a black and white thing. I mean, one of the things I argue is that quitting is not an either or, a toggle switch, turn an honor off.

It's a rheostat dial. In fact, I was just giving a talk the other day and I said, a rheostat dial. Who in here knows what that is? And almost nobody did. And I said, somebody yelled dimmer switch. So I guess that's, that would be a more common term, a dimmer switch, that you can kind of turn it up and turn it a little bit down. That our lives are all about those crossroads,

moments, and deciding whether I need to make a full stop and go in a totally another direction, or maybe a pause in a pivot, maybe looking at things a little different way. You don't have to change everything in order to change some things. And that's the art part. That's the artfulness of it. And that's the kind of creative part of life to me is deciding what you stick with and what you don't.

How do you define quit? Well, you sound unconvinced when you did your little, hmm, I heard that. A little skepticism in the, hmm. No, no, no, I actually am totally convinced that was probably a poorly issued, hmm. Are you all right? No, I'm used to the, hmm, believe me,

when I used to pitch stories, I was at the Chicago Derby for many years and the editor well knew this. I'd come up with another one of my crazy notions and he would say, hmm, so that's why I am so alive to the nuances of say, hmm, so that's why I am so alive to the nuances of them. It wasn't exactly skepticism, it was more like, well, let's see if you can pull this one off, Keller.

Quitting is, again, it can be many different things, but it's become to mean just one thing. So I mentioned there's all this cultural background and all this cultural baggage that it carries that I date back to the 19th century. When people first began to equate effort and staying in the course and sticking with things and kind of being gutsy and hanging in there with moral virtue that hadn't been done before. Before we just lived, you know, the way animals do. And it's a point I make that animals in the wild don't care about looking gutsy. They don't care about not being called quitters, they have to survive. And survival means making often very quick decisions about letting go

of what's not working and going toward what is working. And we often get in the way of that in our own heads because we're sitting here trying to figure out, well, what are people going to say? I mean, we live in a world where the whole world is our mirror and we see ourselves reflected in other people's reactions to what we're doing. And again, I don't say this as someone who has overcome that. I'm the worst ever of like, fearing that judgment of others. Well, maybe I shouldn't quit,

I shouldn't, when I just, I left the Chicago Tribune after being there a dozen years and it was a wonderful job. I had the best job in the world. I could literally write about anything I wanted to write about and had the full backing of this great and Augustine and esteemed institution. And so when I decided to quit

because I wanted to write novels, I mean, people would say to me like, are you nuts or some variation thereof? But you just come to a moment when you know. And I would argue that we do know it in our hearts, our souls, our minds. It's even a spiritual thing, I would argue. We do know. And I would argue that we do know it in our hearts, our souls, our minds. It's even a spiritual thing, I would argue. We do know, but we don't let ourselves do what we know we should because of all that baggage that is heaped atop the idea of quitting.

It's just filled with all kinds of judgment, all kinds of where you quit, you quit too soon, be it jobs, relationships. And I try to emphasize too, I don't just mean just jobs and marriages. I mean everything that we need to change our minds about. I know that I've changed my kind of life philosophy as I've gotten a bit older. I've changed my political beliefs.

It's the best thing in the world to exhibit that kind of cognitive flexibility and kind of keep your mind active by changing, by quitting and going in another direction. So it's a really, it's a, my staff makes fun of me for using this word too much, but it's a capacious understanding of quitting that to use your term there ladders all the way up to cognitive flexibility, intellectual humility, real openness to the many different paths before us in life. That's what I'm hearing when you define quitting.

Yes, yes indeed. But capacious. You just don't hear that word anymore, do you? That's a great word. No, that's exactly right. It is so much bigger and wider and more substantial and again can encompass all of these different realms. We tend to think of quitting again because of quiet quitting and the great resignation, having just come out of the pandemic. Quitting is usually restricted to talking about professions and jobs or grad school or professional school, some sort, should I go and if I go, should I quit and all that. But as you say, it is far more capacious than that. I'm going to work that in every sentence now. I love that. It's a wonderful word. It is so much bigger than that.

It is so much bigger. And again, it becomes really a spiritual quest. We have such a short time here on this earth. And to stick with something past the point where it makes any sense for us, or past the point where it feels right, either intellectually and emotionally, is just foolish and short-sighted and it's just not worthy of us. It's interesting. You know what you just said there strikes a chord with me. I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

I'm 52 and have over the last couple of years been serially divesting myself of professional responsibilities for the exact same reason that you just articulated that to use a cliche, life is short. And as I often say, cliches become cliches for good reason because they're true. Life is short. And how do you want to spend your time in light of that, in light of the truth of mortality. And I think increasingly I have kinds of view, I don't want to spend it doing shit I don't want to do. But I also find that like, I don't know that I could have communicated the whole life is short piece to the 32 year old version of me. It's only recently that I'm starting to be able

to grok that and I wonder if that's kind of a limitation here. Of course, I think you're right. I think there are different life stages we're in and it is hard to argue to somebody or try to argue with a teenager. That's one of the problem with dealing with teenagers, as parents or as concerned the elders in any way is that it's really hard to see your life as anything but in the present moment.

I don't think you can see the whole landscape of it when you're right at the beginning thereof. But there's a proverb that I use right at the beginning of the book when I say, no matter how far you've gone down the wrong road, turn back. And that's very difficult to do though when you are in the midst of things, is to stop and get that perspective. But that's what looking at quitting in a different way requires us to do. And I like that word you used as well, divest yourself of things. Because that divestiture has taken on a much more,

make positive ring lately when we think of, you know, certain companies divesting themselves of certain investments that don't make sense with their, that don't align with their spiritual values. And that's the same thing in our life. We divest ourselves of things that don't align with their spiritual values. And that's the same thing in our life. We divest ourselves of things that don't align with our spiritual values. It's like, if I really want to spend my time that way, do I really want to do this? And I should add, and this is that proposal of what you were saying, it's also quite

difficult. I'm sure you found that. This is not an easy thing. I just gave a talk a couple of weeks ago when someone came up to me and said, but it's really hard. And I said, exactly. It is really hard. You know, I knew exactly what they meant. Nor am I saying that it's always going to work out.

There's certainly things that I have given up on, left behind, quit, that I regret it. But I find even that regret is something that you can learn to savor because it means that you are in motion. You know, one of the points I make in the book, in terms of the neuroscience, is that our brains want to stay active. Our brains want to be in motion. A static brain is an unhealthy brain. One of the things that quitting does is allow us to engage in what I call aerobics for the brain.

Our brains, just like our spirits, want us to stay in motion. They don't want to just stay in one spot. So we're doing ourselves a great favor when we do change very often. You've touched on in the last couple of minutes a bunch of things that I want to circle back to and get you to elaborate upon. But let's just go up a few levels here to a broader view.

You mentioned what we can learn from nature about quitting and you've got a chapter, what birds, bees and gymnasts can tell us about giving up. Can you just say a little bit more about that? Yeah, you know, that's a place I really began, which is looking at evolutionary biology and what we know about how animals, humans are animals of course, just like the birds and the bees and everyone else, but they seem to do it a little bit better, quitting. The way quitting enhances survival.

The examples I use are the finches on Galapagos Island, the famous finches that Charles Darwin studied when he was developing his theory of natural selection. These finches, their diet consists of a seed that's inside a kind of a hard-sided weed. Their beaks of these finches evolve in order to dig out that seed. Certain of the hides on this plant are tougher than others. And if that

bird spends any more than three or four minutes digging it out, it's a great depletion of the bird's energy and strength and the bird will perish. So these finches have to make a decision all the time about when to quit and move on to another. If they stick too long, if they're this, don't quit, stick to it, kind of Nike, just to hang in there, they're going to die. So animals seem to understand that. They know that if they deplete too many resources in pursuit of a goal that quickly becomes apparent, is unattainable, they'll perish. And yet we don't do that. Why don't we? When neuroscientists, of course, study this, they study animals. They study birds and crows and how animals do this. And the example I use

when I mention the gymnast is Simone Biles. I compare her to a honeybee, which sounds like a kind of an odd juxtaposition there. But what we know from the science of honeybees is that female honeybee and only the female sting will sting someone who's approaching the nest. They're gonna protect the hive.

But they don't always sting. They make a decision. It's a pretty important decision because when they sting, they die. They're eviscerated by the sting. So they have to make the decision, is this worth my while? Is this hive, is it fertile enough and is the predator a lethal enough threat to justify my giving up my life? And I compare that to Simone Biles when she got to the Tokyo Olympics, looked at what she needed to do and realized that she wasn't right. She wasn't feeling right.

And of course, gymnastics at her elite level can be life-threatening. I mean, some of the maneuvers they have to do. So I compare her to this honeybee that's making this decision. Is this worth my while to do this? Is this worth the cost of my life? Simone Biles decided no. A lot of honeybees decide no, and they stand down, they don't sting. And her recent success, I think, makes the point even more emphatically that she was exactly

right. It wasn't worth the cost of death or injury for her to continue when she just didn't feel right, so she quit. And if you remember, she got a lot of criticism for that. And some people said, oh, fine, you know, you go, girl, we're backing you all the way. But Twitter, X, can be a very tough jury. And she was really criticized by a lot of people for quitting, which kind of makes a point about how we hold it in such disregard. So Simone Biles, like Honeybees, made that decision, which we make moment by moment, is this worth what I'm having to give up? And she decided in that moment, no, I wanna live to continue my sport. And now of course she's had a magnificent success. You have referenced neuroscience quite a bit.

You've got a lovely phrase, the neuroscience of nope. What do we know about what's happening in our brains when we quit? You know, we know more and more and more than we ever did before. And yet we're still just at the cusp of really understanding what happens in our brains and where it happens when we decide to change course, when we say, not

this way, but another way. I interviewed several neuroscientists who are working on this, and they're using, of course, fish and mice and rats and all the usual laboratory personnel. And you might ask why. People might say, well, why? Are we using government money to fund this research? Well, for a very good reason, because at the center of whether we quit or not are many issues of addiction.

How do we help people who are addicted to substances they'd rather quit that they feel they're unable to? And on the other hand, we have people who suffer from depression and anxiety, who need more motivation, who quit too easily. So it's modulating those issues and how do we help people live better, healthier, happier lives? And what neuroscientists have found is that there are specific places in the brain and specific neurons involved, specific brain cells involved in quitting. There are electrical signals that ping back and forth between the neurons

and there are chemicals that are involved in this as well. And this is what they're involved in pinpointing. It's been done at several different laboratories. And it's quite fascinating. And it's why I sort of make the argument that quitting is so much at the center of who we are as human beings. It's when we quit and how we quit. And it's very complex, as you can imagine.

I mentioned the chemical and electrical signals, but it's more than that too, of course. It's also our environment. With addicts, it's not just what's happening in your brain. It's what's happening to your body and the world. It's what's happening in images that we see. It's so extraordinarily complex, but not so complex that we can't undertake it.

And it's so important that we do find out the why and the how. I don't know that I would have drawn a link between quitting cigarettes or anything you're addicted to and quitting a job or quitting a relationship that's not working. Why not? Why not? Do you think? I don't know. When one of my producers, Justine, pitched having you on and I took in the notion of quitting as a life strategy and then she gave me some research. I don't know, somehow I guess it was never really mentioned in there and I never put it in that bucket. It's very interesting. I'm not in any way, I'm not being skeptical now. It's just interesting to think aloud about how that kind of quitting of a bad

habit is related to quitting a bad job and the more I speak the more I realize that yeah it's the same fucking thing. No I think you know when you say that I think that's part of what I was referencing earlier when I said in some ways we kind of lowball quitting we kind of think quitting a job we've all done that you know we've all walked out of a particular job we've all left relationships or friendships that don't seem to be working. If we don't actively leave them, like,

all right, I never want to speak to you again, Dan, forget it, it's over. There's also just the kind of like ghosting, you know, you don't return somebody's text and all that. So we see it at this low level. And yet, as I'm arguing, and I think your beautiful notion about the latter rising up,

that quitting, it may start at the level of a job or maybe a friendship is just not working out, or maybe a book club you're kind of tired of, or a Friday afternoon after work gathering, you just don't want to participate anymore. That's one kind of quitting. But then that ladder rises up and it keeps going up and up and up. It's all quitting, but of course, each rung represents the kind of a broadening of the notion until it gets to, I think, the spiritual place that I mentioned. Because it's only in kind of thinking about this a lot

and reading a lot about the biographies of famous people and things that they quit and didn't. This enlargement of the idea of quitting came to me. And that's why I was interested in why it seemed, initially, at least, not quite plausible to you to make that connection between quitting a job and then, say say quitting a terrible addiction and getting oneself free of something that's so life crippling as an addiction to drugs or alcohol or OCD or these other kinds of things that were held captive by

by our brains. Yeah, because I think I was stuck in some ways in the notwithstanding our discussion of capaciousness that I was stuck in in some ways in the narrow definitionstanding our discussion of capaciousness, that I was stuck in some ways in the narrow definition. Again, I think that's a symptom of just what I'm talking about, the fact that we don't give enough credit to quitting. Coming up, Julia Keller talks about why quitting is often seen as a moral failing and her term, the myth of perseverance. Hi, I'm Anna. And I'm Emily.

We're the hosts of Wanderies podcast Terribly Famous, a show where we bring you outrageous true stories about our most famous celebrities. Our latest season is all about the catwalk queen Naomi Campbell. The years Naomi had to fight to be treated fairly in an industry that was overwhelmingly white. That drive saw her break down barriers and reached the pinnacle of high fashion, but it also got her into some dangerous situations when it spilled over into an anger she couldn't control.

In our new season, Naomi Campbell's model behaviour, we tell the story of how a young girl from South London became a trailblazing black icon, but had some very public falls, of how she stood up to the British tabloids and won, and the lengths she had to go to to be the first black woman in history to make the cover of French Vogue. But she risks losing it all when her explosive behavior lands her in court. Follow terribly famous wherever you listen to podcasts or listen early and add free on Wondery Plus on Apple Podcasts or the Wondery App. to your time event, offering limited time savings and incentives on new homes in neighborhoods across the GTA and beyond. Contact us today at mademyhomes.com slash now's your time. fifth. Why is this? Why do we have this narrow view of quitting? You've referenced some of the cultural influences and I know you've gone back and traced this down to its roots. What did you learn?

Nineteenth century London, 1859. Man named Samuel Smiles writes a book called Self-Help with illustrations of character and conduct. This to me, if you're going to find, like, go back to the principal cause, that's it right there. It's really the first time that anybody had linked the idea of working hard with not only virtue but life success. He wrote a series of short biographical portraits and used them as kind of motivational techniques. This had not been done before. And he said, if you want to learn how to be a better person, look at what these people have done.. And he said, if you want to learn how to be a better person, look at what these people have done. They stayed the course, they stuck with it, and

here they are. It was a huge bestseller. It was absolutely phenomenal bestseller. People were eager to hear this message because in the Industrial Revolution, a lot of people were poor, downtrodden. I mean, there were people literally dying in the streets, but a very few people were succeeding and had these mammoth fortunes. And if you were a decent person, you looked at this and you said, why? Why would a just and loving God allow this to happen? Well, the idea of self-help was a way for people to justify this in their minds. Ah, I've got it. Those people at the top worked harder. They stayed the course. They're gritty. They're resilient. These people at the bottom, these people that I have to

step over as the gin bottle rolls away down the alley, those people didn't work hard. They quit. They're lazy. They're bums. And that idea permeated the culture over the next century and a half. And it continues to present day. I think how often we just hear it even in our political conversations. It's that if people are successful, we'd love these stories. We'd love these long profiles of Elon Musk or Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos. I'm sure these people did work very hard. They did. But so do a lot of people.

So do a lot of people who then don't make it. People who are burdened by problems we can see and some problems we can't. But because we have equated success with moral virtue and with staying the course and sticking with it and being gritty, we really fail to see how much I think happenstance just is a huge factor in life. Things just happen. Bad luck happens. People are born with physical, emotional, intellectual disabilities. People are born black or brown in this culture where being white is a great advantage. We know these things, and yet we tend to discount them when we're talking about success. I think one thing is because we're sort of afraid that kids are going to hear that and think, oh, well, why should I work hard?

Doesn't matter anyway, right? Well, of course not. Of course, working hard is important, but it doesn't guarantee anything. And we somehow, again, once we put that moral gloss upon success or failure, we're kind of lost then because we really fail to see the nuances about this crazy journey of being human. You said it just a little bit right there, but you say it at great length in the nuances about this crazy journey of being human. You said it just a little bit right there, but you say it at great length in the book that this focus on grit, focus on perseverance, you call it the myth of perseverance, it can reduce our compassion.

I'll just gonna quote you here. "'To hold people responsible for their life situation without taking into account the specifics of their struggles and to stigmatize them for quitting allows an unjust world to flourish. Yes, yes, I really believe that is so. We must take into account the circumstances around people's lives, which is hard.

It's a hard thing to do. I mean, how much easier it is to just look at a group of people and kind of stigmatize them automatically without looking at what lies behind who they are and where they've been and how they get there. Because another question I had, and I think we all have this from time to time, is why do we allow the income inequality that we have now, which is just this unprecedented level?

Why do we allow that to exist? Why aren't we out marching in the streets? Why don't we demand a fairer tax code? Why aren't we more upset about the lack of affordable housing? It's not because we're bad people. I truly don't believe that. I think most people are just basically pretty darn decent. I really do. Despite you see the anomalies on the news every night, you'll see a few bad actors, but mostly, mostly, we're all pretty good decent people. So why? Why do we allow that to happen? And I think the cause of that, you can really put

your finger on it right there, is because we really fail to appreciate the unique circumstances that go into making every human soul. That we all have burdens and we all have gifts that other people can't be aware of just from a cursory glance at us. So we end up being, I think, very, very intolerant and impatient with people who haven't had the advantages that other people have had. And it's much easier to all just chalk everything up to grit or the lack thereof. Yeah, I can see another pernicious impact of this, which is that it really reinforces this myth of individualism, which I think probably goes hand in hand with the myth of perseverance that when you succeed or when you fail, it's really all on you.

It's divorced from a larger system. Of course, we're all embedded in larger systems. Remember Barack Obama back when he was president, gotten trouble for saying something to the effect of you think you built that company, but you didn't build that. I can't remember the exact context, but he was pointing out that even successful people who may have built successful companies, they think they did it on their own. But of course, the government built the roads for them. They were a lie on fire departments and police departments.

They rely on everybody on their staff from the janitors to senior management. And nothing happens on its own. And this idea that we've been imbued with in our culture of individualism, I think it can lead to unfortunate policy decisions. And I think it can make us more unhappy and anxious because of course the way we're designed as creatures is to be interlocked, interwoven. No, I think you're quite right. That is another political dimension of this, I think is quite

right. And even, right, you know, what we do as a community, we decide to give certain, you know, grants and scholarships so people can go be educated so they can work in these factories and in these businesses that people do build. But it is, again, it's this subtle nuance though, Dan, that's the thing that's tough for people, I think, because it's this all or nothing idea. Either you believe that you individually did it and individuals are solely responsible for their own lives, or you believe that we're part of these vast social systems.

And we get kind of broken into these individual camps that seem to be in opposition to each other. And they're just not. It's not an either or or it's a both and. It's all of that. Of course the individual matters. Of course individual effort matters. I mean, I remember writing a dissertation

and being up three nights in a row all night long. And if somebody had said, well, but look at all the help you're getting and look at all I always said, help. Who was there at 3 a.m.? When I was on my 12th cup of coffee and trying to come up with this thing. I mean, we all have moments when we know

we think it's all on us. And yet the reality is, of course, we are these interlocking, constantly shifting circles and Venn diagrams that, you know, out of which emerges what looks like an individual, but really isn't. And there is something maybe uniquely American about that. I'm not sure about that aspect, you know.

Is it just American, this ideal? Certainly American individualism has been something that has been so prominent in our culture over the more than two centuries that we've been a country. This idea of kind of frontier mythology, you push through and you keep going and all this, there is this kind of American ideal in that, not to say that other nations don't have it, but we seem to really put it at the top of the heap of what we consider to be American. It's the idea of individualism. And yet we are all part of these systems

and we're all dependent on each other at all times. And that's something that maybe is not very comfortable to recognize. Maybe that's part of the reason that we don't like to talk about it or even acknowledge it or own thoughts is that it's just not very comfortable to think that I need, I need all these other people to help me along.

Yeah. Well said. You refer to it as a both hand. I mean, it's a paradox. Maybe that's what a paradox is both hand, hit me up on X or Twitter to school me on that, or maybe I'll just go on Google later. But anyway, uh, the, the great meditation teacher, seven, a Salasi was a great friend of mine, talks about this quite a bit, that how do we understand the notion of oneness or interconnection when I feel like me and I can do things and create results in the world. So am I not an individual

with agency or am I like part of some undifferentiated blob of oneness of the universe and She's always saying yeah. Yeah, it's a paradox. It's both things are true at the same time You are not separate. She often says you're not separate from the universe But you're not the same as everybody else at the same time. So you are an individual and you're undifferentiated How are we completely unique in the history of the world? There has never been a Julia or a Dan before, quite like us. So, given that, how can we ever talk about this interconnectedness and the fact that we are all dependent on each other and we are all little pieces of each other? You know, we know that from physics. I mean, we all, we're all stardust.

We're all little bits and pieces of stars that exploded long ago in the universe. So, how can all that be? And yet yet how can we also claim we're individual? So out of that paradox comes this, I think, very, very odd and ultimately not helpful stigmatizing of quitting. I think it really comes out of all that because these are hard things to think about. And who wants to sit around and think hard things all day long? I mean, it's much easier to just go with the current cultural thinking, which is stick with it, just do it, hang in there. That's a lot easier. I mean, I like that too sometimes.

It's just like if I just stick with it, I often say when I go to this exercise class I go to, I talk to my colleagues in there and I say, you know, the great thing when you're on the treadmill and you're so tired and you're just, you really, I said, we can quit. I always laugh and I'll turn to them and I'll say, you know what, it's not like school. We can quit. I

can quit anytime I want. I can walk out of here. I'm paying them. I can walk out of here. And because I can quit, I don't. That's what keeps me there because I can't. And it's it. So we have the autonomy, but within that autonomy, we choose to make another decision and to not quit. So these are tough, tough concepts, I think, to think about, but ultimately are very positive ones and are ones that help get us to a better place. I think we would all argue that we're in kind of a place we don't wanna be, perhaps, as a nation and just as people in general.

There are things that are troubling us and there are things that are kind of boiling under the surface that we really wanna head off. Let me just go back to some of the cultural influences and not just cultural, just some of the factors that reinforce our bias against quitting. You talked about Samuel Smiles, two other things that come up in my mind. One, maybe the maybe just redundant and the second I think is worth dwelling on. The Protestant work ethic, maybe that is what Samuel Smiles was

articulating, but if not, maybe it's worth disambiguating. And then the sunk cost fallacy, which is a common human bias. Can you tackle those? That's a biggie. The sunk cost fallacy, it's huge. It's what really gets us into so much trouble. I think that really is the terminology for the proverb I referenced earlier, which is when you've gone too far down the wrong road, turn back, that when you spent so much time and effort going in one direction, you don't want to lose all that. And so what we end up doing is basically not throwing

good money after bad. The examples I think of often are things like Ferenose, you know, the Elizabeth Holmes company, where she knew early on that it wasn't working. This device they created wasn't working. So the question I asked like in my book is, so why didn't she quit? Had she quit early on and said, okay, folks, this just doesn't work, everybody, we need to go back to the drawing board. But she didn't. And why? And again, I may be the

polyanna here. I don't believe it's because she was a bad person who intended to deceive anybody. I think she got caught up in this sunk cost fallacy. We've gone this far. So what do we do? And the example I use against that is to look at like a Thomas Edison, who instead of the St. Cos fallacy, which is, look, I've gone this far with this thing. It's not working. I've got to stick with it. No, Edison quit all the time. He was a virtuoso of quitting.

Thomas Edison would try literally tens of thousands of ways to solve a problem. He was trying to create a synthetic rubber at one point, and he used thousands and thousands and thousands of plants. And he would get so far along in his experiment and had put so much money into it, so much laboratory time and so much payment of his employees working on it. But if it didn't work, it didn't work. Back up, back up the truck, turn, go to another. Kind of the opposite of an Elizabeth Holmes. We do get caught up in this cost fallacy. I've gone this far Relationships all the time. It's like I've gone this far. We've been married this long. How can I quit now?

Well, I would argue of course that you owe it to yourself to do that quitting to pause and pivot But the Suncos fallacy indeed and you mentioned the Protestant work ethic. Yes, that also is Standing behind our demonization of quitting is this this idea, and I mentioned the virtue too, that is applied to not quitting and to hanging in there. Certainly that's in the balance as well. I interviewed Adam Grant, of course, a very well-known author and business professor. And he referenced, when I spoke with him about this issue,

he too referenced the Protestant work ethic, standing in the background there, kind of whispering at us all the time. And it influenced our thinking and influencing our negative ideas about quitting. This work ethic that what you do is who you are, and if you quit somehow, you're going against not just others, but yourself.

It's almost an extinguishing of the self if you quit. Coming up, Julia Keller talks about what we can learn from historical figures, athletes and celebrities who have quit, the concept of quasi quitting and how to talk to your kids about healthy quitting. Hello, I'm Alice Levine and I am one of the hosts of British Scandal. So I want you to imagine that you're being offered £500,000 to introduce someone to your ex. I mean the answer is still no. So you shake hands and agree to do it.

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Get closer to the best you with Audible. Explore a wealth of well-being titles like Bestsellers, New releases, and exclusive originals. Listen now on Audible. So let's talk about the how here because I think you very firmly established the why. Why quit? Let's talk about how quit. You've acknowledged that it's hard. You threw out some hypotheticals just a few paragraphs ago. You're in inner relationship and a marriage and you've gone this far and then you get hit by a bolt of wisdom that no actually probably you should quit. Same for a job, same for a friendship, same for a book you might be writing. Whatever it is, how do you do it once you've read Julia's book and decided you should?

do it once you've read Julia's book and decided you should. You know, I do think there are some strategies, some tactics that you can employ as you try to do this. The ultimate strategy, of course, to me is always reading. I mean, reading is always my therapy. I love reading biographies. I'm a real student of biography to look at how other people have done this. How did other people make change in their life?

I referenced Thomas Edison. There's a great Thomas Edison biography by the late wonderful biographer Edmund Morris. When you read about how other people did it, how other people made changes in their life, it's not going to be immediately applicable to your life, of course, but it is going to give you some broad strokes that you might be able to incorporate in your own life. But one thing I also recommend is the kind of quasi quit, which I mean not that full stop I mentioned earlier, but a pause and a pivot of stopping and maybe changing a few things,

if not everything to not look upon quitting as an either or either I stick with this or I don't in terms of jobs and relationships, maybe talking with in a relationship, the partner in a job, the boss, whoever it might be, trying to change things so they're just a little bit more to your liking, to not think everything has to go away all at once. Now, everything might have to. Sometimes it's exactly what we need is this heartbreak and this big change, but sometimes even a small change can be what we need to make things a little more to our liking and this notion of what we deserve as human beings, I think,

because I sort of come from a background where it's somehow to say what you want and what you need is seen as kind of selfish and self-aggrandizing. And it isn't, we're all we've got, this is it. So those are just some of the minor strategies that I would recommend to people is this quasi-quit, the pause in a pivot to read a lot and read good biographies of how other people have done it.

Everybody from famous historical people, of course, but even in some subtler ways too, looking at how people have changed their lives. An example I use is Harry and Meghan, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. I mean, people said, you can't quit the role. Well, you can't, and they did. And you could argue whether or not that was a good idea.

But ultimately, that's not our decision to make. That's their decision to make and their heart and mind. But you can shed whatever isn't working for you. And somehow, I know for me, reading also about sports figures too, who have left early. Andrew Luck, the very, very talented, very successful in the Annapolis Colts quarterback, who simply decided that, and it was a great surprise when he quit, but he decided that the pain, the physical pain he was going through, some of the emotional issues he was going through,

did not dovetail well with what he wanted to be as a man and as a husband and as a father and as a citizen. And so we quit. And somehow reading about other people, have they made these decisions? And again, we're not Andrew Luck. I mean, I'm not an NFL quarterback of great renown and immense fortune. However, we can take some hints and glimmers from the lives of other people, which is why I've always loved biography. There's always something in every other human life that we can look at and take to heart and modify maybe just a bit so it's relevant to our lives and experiences. As you talk about Andrew Luck, Jerry Seinfeld came to mind for me and obviously quite famously after having done his show Seinfeld he quit at the peak

and and was interesting about that was that's an interesting counter example because he was that's an interesting counter example because he was lionized for going out on top. Well, once again, I talk about paradox. Our views about quitting are a little peculiar when you think of it. Yes, just as you say, they're going out on top and not letting your skills diminish. You know, I was a cultural critic at the Tribune

and I remember writing a column when John Elway retired from the Broncos as a quarterback. You know, they won the Super Bowl and I remember thinking, but he still had skills. He still had skills and you know, don't quit now, still stick with it. And I realized it was sort of like undermining my own advice that I'm giving now

my own feelings about this, which only makes the point that there's not one way to quit. There's not one way to quit and not one way to persevere. It is highly individual. We can be influenced by others. It's kind of like anybody you ask for advice.

They're not gonna give you every particular, every step. But they're going to say, you might wanna think about this. You might wanna include this in your perspective. So yes, I can argue it both ways in sports, and argue it both ways with a Seinfeld, argue it both ways with Greta Garbo. You could argue it went out on top.

I mean, she had not diminished at all. It was still very popular and simply decided, I've had enough, I don't wanna do this anymore. And left the world to wonder for many, many decades hence. So I think it goes back to your dimmer switch idea. Quitting is a gradient, a spectrum, and the art is knowing when to quit, when to persevere, depending on your circumstances,

internal or external. And obviously that's a very tough recipe and you acknowledge it. It's hard to discern. I think the core point you're making, or at least a core point you're making, is quitting should be on the table, as opposed to off the table and demonized

the way it is for many of us much of the time. And to fear it, yeah, yeah, exactly. And I said that somewhat glibly when I said, it's hard, it's really hard. And I didn't mean to even saying it that way makes it sound almost comical. But the reality is, I think it's one of the hardest things we ever do. Again, jobs and relationships, it's always that's quitting always comes down to jobs and relations. But it's so much more than that. When you think of changing a spiritual belief, changing a political belief, I mean, these are life altering changes and we can do them at any age, people can change.

I remember hearing Chris Matthews in the MSNBC political commentator and author. At one point he was talking about some politician that done something nasty and horrible. So it could have been anybody, right? I don't even have to identify. And he said, but people don't change, people don't change. And I remember thinking like, oh, my heavens, I put my head in my hands and I said, people don't even have to identify." And he said, but people don't change. People don't change. And I remember thinking like, oh, my heavens, you know, I put my head in my hands and I said,

people don't change. We change all the time. We change all the time. And that's the glory. That's the glory. Yes, in good ways and bad ways. It's always, I mean, often you know, you're running to someone and say, they're just not who they were. There's something different there. There's something, I mean, thank goodness we can change all the time. But even when you're 90 years old, you can change your political views, your views of what this thing called life really is. You can change your preferences and anything. And again, that's part of the glory of it. And instead of seeing it as a bad thing, as someone being kind of unserious and kind of flighty. It's actually the great glory of humanity.

I was at a baseball game the other day with an old friend of mine, Ron Claybourne. We used to work together at ABC News. We both have since retired from ABC News, so we both are quitters. And we were having, when we go to a baseball game we often like a half watch a game and half, you know Talk about stuff and we're having a debate slash discussion on this notion of character is destiny And he advanced the theory and I was saying yeah, but I don't think character is immutable I think the whole point of Buddhism the whole point of my career and personal development, everything I've learned from spiritual traditions and neuroscience is that you can change.

Yes. Not easy, but you can do it. Oh, yes. Yes. It's funny. You say character is destiny, somewhat, but I would also argue environment is destiny, and circumstances are destiny, and things do happen to us. So it is, it's all of this,

it's this great kind of swirling mist of things that happen to us all the time. And just as you say, changeable. There is this mutability about our lives and about all of these aspects and things that happen to us as we go along. So, and they're all equally important at various times. They're times when character is destiny.

There are moments we come to, but then there are times when the circumstances, destiny, it just happened. So yeah, that's what we do. We go to ball games and we talk about these things and it's a great thing. I mean, there's nothing I like better than to have these conversations because even in in having them, I mentioned all of our 86 billion neurons, and each of us has about 86 billion, the average human, are all engaged all at once with all of this. There's nothing that we do that where part of our brain can kind of just be relaxed and sitting back and with his feet up. All of these neurons get involved and are engaged when we think about these things.

And there's nothing better than that. Again, that's this exercise that we do. And it keeps us sharp, it keeps us nimble, it keeps us fit, not only physically and neurologically, but I would argue spiritually and emotionally as well. So how do we talk to the younger people in our lives? It could be our children, or it could be our mentees, grandchildren, anybody who's seeking advice from us. How do we advise them on this line between the sort of unhealthy, unwholesome quitting and the healthy wholesome whys quitting. I'm just just by way of an example, our son, who's eight has been complaining a lot about having to practice the drums. And he will acknowledge that he wants,

in his saner moments, will acknowledge that he wants us to continue nagging him because he wants to learn how to play, but he is complaining about and so my wife and I are talking about a lot about, you know, do we want to force this kid to, he seems to be putting up a, doing a lot of squawking here, maybe we should let him find something else. And so how do you, in that case, that's just a good example of like, how do you talk to young people about the value of, there is some value to perseverance and grace and there's some value to wisely discerning when you're on the wrong path?

That's probably the number one question I would get in doing this research for about a year and a half talking to people. What do I do when my kid wants to quit the French horn or soccer or coutillion, whatever it might be? That's exactly it because we all want to do the right thing as parents. You want, you want to do the right thing. You don't want to, you don't want your kid to be a quitter. No one wants a kid that, the least, the first time it gets hard, it's like, fine, I'm out of here. You don't want that. But nor do you want a kid who is miserable. Some of the best interviews I did, I mean, I would never like give people life advice

based on my life, but, but I talked to a lot of people about this and people who were in charge, people, you know, teachers and coaches, a couple of the really smart, interesting people I talk to. One was a woman, Dr. Christian Diffenbach, who is in a sports psychology program at West Virginia University. And she talks about her son as a hockey player. And she deals with athletes all the time too and in her work.

And so that's the question. So your son wants to quit hockey, what do you do? And she says, first thing we have is the conversation. And one thing it's a good conversation to have. The quitting issue allows you to have a conversation with both the young person that you're trying to guide in some way. It's a perfect opening to talk about this.

It's like, so why do you want to quit? If it's because I'm just tired and I'd rather play video games. All right, that's one conversation. And obviously, that's not going to be acceptable. But if the kid says, I don't want to do this, you figure out the reasons why. And so it is the kind of threshold to another kind of conversation about who this person is. I mean, this person may be small and maybe your child, but they're also a human being and they have wants and desires and needs and fears and different things going on with them. So the opposite of that, she would say to her son,

if it's to play video games and no, that's not going to work. We need to find another way around this to get over this moment here when you're just kind of tired of it, is a friend of mine I spoke with whose son was playing football in high school, wanted to quit, came here and said, I want to quit. And she said, no, no, no, your father played collegiate football. We believe in sports. Why do you want to quit? We're not going to let you just quit. Turned out, he was a big kid.

He was playing on the O-line, the offensive line. And turned out, he didn't like the hitting. He didn't like hurting people. He was a big kid and he, that's what he really disliked about it. The moment she found that out, he'd never expressed that to her before. You know, he was one of these kids that just doesn't talk a lot about feelings. The moment she heard that, that became a different kind of conversation then. And she said, all right, what do, she said, so it isn't that you don't like sports and you don't like the practice. He said, oh, no, no, no, I love that. I love being on a

team. I love, so he started playing basketball and had a wonderful time, his senior year, as a basketball player because he felt he didn't have that hurting people. And so that was a conversation they would not have happened, that would not have happened between them, had the quitting issue not come up. And there was a completely different answer that way. So it enabled this conversation. So often it's not so much in the people that I spoke with

of, and I spoke to many teachers too, they talked about if a kid was really having trouble and wanted to quit a subject or wanted to quit on a particular project That's what they then they would have that that that conversation The conversation would not have happened had the quitting issue not come up say alright You want to quit so why it's too hard for you? Tell me about that how how hard have you really worked on it and we're generally pretty honest honest. If somebody really comes at you and says, how hard did you really work on this day? And you're not going to lie. You're going to say, all right, so maybe I didn't give it everything I had. Okay, well, why not? Why don't enjoy this? Well, what if we tried to put this

many hours in this? So, I mean, I'm getting kind of granular here, but each of these quitting issues ushers in another kind of conversation, a good conversation to have, a conversation that is very revelatory, I think, and very, it illuminates things about the personality and the sort of emotional structure that the person is endowed with. So it's a good thing to have. Is it possible that beneath all of the complexity of these issues surrounding quitting, when to quit, how to quit, when to stick with it, what are your life circumstances internally and externally that actually there is a pretty reliable North Star coursing beneath all of

it which is like if you strip everything away, what do you, Julia, what do I, Dan, what is my son, Alexander, what do we want? What do we actually care about? What do we enjoy? That seems like a really important thing to identify and let your decisions, if not entirely, at least significantly flow out of that. Boy, I think so. And maybe you've been in this circumstance too, but I've been asked that sometimes. If I'm really at a quandary, I'm really at a crossroads, and I have a good friend that will always say, so what do you want? And then she'll change the emphasis slightly. She'll say, what do you want? What do you... And if I can't answer, and usually I can't, I mean, I think that's a really hard question to answer because we all kind of answer in the

Short-term it's like well at the moment. I just want to be rid of this terrible situation. No, no, no What do you want? What do you want? It's a very difficult question to answer and when you can answer it Not just honestly because it's not a matter of being honest or dishonest It's a matter of when you can find that through line just as you're saying. And I like your metaphor as well, the North Star. We know it's there, but sometimes it's sort of a cloudy night. So it's not always the brightest star in the heavens at that moment, but it's hard to find sometimes when you can get to it. And again, the quitting issue forces us to look up into that night sky and to find it.

Usually we can just kind of bumble along as we do, but that's what these aspects of quitting and asking ourselves these quitting questions gets us to where we do have to lean back a little bit, look up and figure out what is that. And I would argue that even a kid, even like your son, even somebody who's a bit younger, is able to answer that and at least get to that answer.

If someone answers too glibly, then I know they're just kind of answering superficially. But when you really, really dig down, it's the most profound question we answer. What do we want? What is our ultimate goal here? Because we all have different gifts, talents, interests, and it's finding that one that is unique to us. That's a life's mission, a life's journey. Yeah, another way to phrase that question is what is your why or what matters most? What matters most is a question that my meditation teacher, Joseph Goldstein, has a real knack for coming up with pithy questions or

phrases that cut through the confusion. What matters most is a pretty good question to drop into your mind sometimes when you're in the, when the clouds are obscuring the stars to use your metaphor. Yeah, I think so. And again, these things are just very, very difficult. You know, I had no idea when I started this quitting idea, said I interviewed a lot of people. I love talking to people about their lives,

my very favorite thing. You must love it too, because you do it. Talking with people and asking about this, I loved hearing the answers. And at first it was just really fun. Said I love lots of stories, love stories. We learn through stories, we live through stories, stories are who we are. But the more I got into it, kind of the deeper and more profound and more difficult, difficult in a good way, and more perplexing

it became. And I didn't know what the end of this was going to be when I began. I thought it was going to be like a lot of good stories and a lot of the books, the nonfiction books I read are just that. Different people's experiences, how they got there, what they did. I mentioned loving biography and that's why. How did they do it? How did they get there? Love that. But it became deeper and deeper and more profound. You know, I end up with kind of a meditation on my father's life. His life in many ways was very frustrating. He could not quit smoking. He tried everything to quit smoking. Quitting was very much at the center of his life. I did not expect to end up there. When I began writing this book, I didn't think, oh, my last chapter is going to be all about

my father who died of lung cancer at 52, died hating the habit of smoking, tried every day of his adult life to quit, could not quit, began to define his life in ways that were not helpful. And he was brilliant, man. He was a math professor. And for all of his brilliance and all of his mathematical acumen, the one thing he couldn't figure out was how to get past this terrible habit that he knew was killing him and ultimately did kill him. But to see his life as only not being able to quit something, he seemed really unworthy of who he was to me. And I didn't want to see his life that way, even though that really did define his life in many ways,

to get past that in my own thinking. So this became a really different kind of a journey for me as I wrote this book on quitting. Again, I didn't start out, I wouldn't have made these claims. If you talk to me, say, I was just starting to write the book and you called me and said,

so how's it going? What are you gonna write about? I would have told you the stories, we would have gone through some of the anecdotes are quite fun and funny about how people quit things or not quit things. I would have had all that and I could have, but I never would have been able to convey at that point because it hadn't happened yet for me. The kind of enlightenment that resulted from looking at quitting as indeed probably the most profound moment of all of our lives, every life, that moment when we decide what to stay with and what to abandon and why.

One more thing in your book that I think will help with the how of all of this is your suggestion to find a community of quitters. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, I, you know what I was talking to, doing an interview with a woman who talked about the hardest part for her about leaving her workplace was leaving others, having this, we all, we love more colleagues, we love and hate them. I always say the things I missed about the Tribune

weren't the people I really liked, the journalist colleagues I liked were the ones I didn't because they always gave me the best stories. You know, I'd always say, oh my God, that guy that's in the next gimmick hole, I can't stand that guy. So I always admit that you quit, you lose that community when you quit. You lose that sense of being a part of something. That means you have to make another one. And as we know, a workplace community is kind of just, it just happens. It's just, you just happen into it. You didn't deliberately do it. But you have to be a lot more mindful

about creating another community. And I kind of fancifully call it a community of quitters, but truly you find other people who have gone through this. And you think of yourself as part of another community. You're now part of community people who have made this decision to go in another direction. That sense of community I think is vitally important too. I mean, I work alone. I'm a writer. And that's really what I miss. So I have to go out now and find it. You know, I've never, I've never gotten much out of being in

writing groups. I thought it was more about working on my work and come to find out, no, it's not working on my work. You're not in a writing group to make your writing better. You're in a writing group for your own sanity to make yourself better, to make it to be in another place. Again, that's something I would never have known had I not lived through it and lived through some of those times. You have to look upon quitting as this activity that can be good or bad or dark or light depending upon how it's done and when it's done and what you're doing it for and ultimately where you land afterward. And I do think this community of quitters is kind of maybe a good one, if a bit fanciful,

to keep in mind as you go along that you're now part of a new community. But it is important to establish that community to do that as you go along. And you're not the lone pilgrim sailing along the rough and choppy seas of having quit something and maybe being deemed a quitter. I wholeheartedly agree with that. And I would add that, and I suspect you would agree with this, that community can be really important when you're

making decisions about whether to quit or not. One of my favorite phrases is never worry alone. Oh, oh, very nice. I've not heard that. That's really good. That's really good. I think that's quite right. And to recognize we are a part of this larger,

see, just because you don't have people around you, I've seen in a workplace, I said it's kind of easy. Now people did work at home during the pandemic, of course, but in general, the nature of a workplace is you have people around you. You know, if you're working on the, if you're working on an Amazon fulfillment center, you've got people around you filling the boxes too.

If you work in an office or wherever it might be, you have people around you, but you have to be a lot more deliberate about it and methodical about it when you don't have that easy. If you leave a job or a relationship or whatever it might be, you have to find this new community. It's equally important. It's just not as easy because it just doesn't happen. It's not around you. When you're in a school setting, you have your classmates all around you, work, you have your colleagues. So we have to work a little harder to have that community. And as you say, then when things go wrong, you kind of had that already set in place there. Never worry alone. I like that a lot.

Julie, is there something I should have asked in this conversation that I didn't ask? Is there a place you wanted to go that I didn't give you an opportunity to go? No, I just guess I did want to mention kind of the personal part at the end there that that was not an intention to go with my own family in there. I mean, as I said, I haven't quit probably more or less things than anybody else. I just think that when you begin to contemplate this issue of quitting and why we do put this negative onus upon it, it does lead you into some interesting places. And you do end up

kind of going back around, you know, the TS Eliot line about the end of all of our journey is to get back to the beginning and to know the place for the first time. That's what a contemplation of quitting does for us. So I did want to be sure and mention that, that it does take on these higher dimensions and it isn't just about whether you quit your job or get divorced and remarry or not remarry or whatever it is you might do in your life. We have these quitting moments all the time and they can make us or they can leave us where we are. Yeah, I should have, I'm sorry, I should have picked up on that earlier.

It is an important point and because the seemingly narrow question of quitting actually just brings you right up against existential issues of the big decisions in your life. Boy, I think so. And we see, you know, politicians are always being, they're criticized one way or another, you know, they're either, they quit too soon, they quit too late. We see so much through that lens of quitting, which is, again, I only began to notice that when I began to write this book and to think about quitting in a little deeper way than just stay or go. It's always more than stay or go, although stay or go is actually how the neuroscientists will define this particular kind of exploration, the stay or go decisions that our brains make all the time.

And you do see it in a political sense all the time. Who needs to quit? How do you know when to quit? Right now the issues, which politicians are too old and should quit and leave her. It's all this quitting. Quitting just is at the center of everything when you think of it that way. The United States is positioned in the world. What do we stay with or what do we quit? No one wants to be called a quitter, but on the other hand, we also don't want to look foolish if you stay too long in a bad situation. When you think of it, our recent history, our recent military history is all about quitting or not.

Did we stay too long in Vietnam? Did we quit too soon in Afghanistan? Did we, regardless of one's political affiliation, these questions of staying or going, of quitting or staying the course, has this moral dimension and then it also has this historical dimension too that I think just can't be ignored once you kind of go down the road. Indeed.

If people want to go down the road with you, can you remind them of the name of your book and any other resources you've put out into the universe that you want us to know about? It is. The book is called Quitting, A Life Strategy, The Myth of Perseverance and How the New Science of Giving Up Can Set You Free, which I know is a bold claim. I hope we can back it up. My website is juliackeller.net and I get a lot of mail through there. I get mail very interesting. I heard from a man just the other day who quit his job to become a psychotherapist.

He's trying to be a psychotherapist now and Lord knows we need all the skilled psychotherapists we can get. So good for him. But then I also got a note from another man through the website. You can email me there who said that he said, well, how do I explain how's he supposed to pay his mortgage and feed his children now that he's quit his job? And I really didn't have a ready answer for that one. I'm certainly not advising anyone to quit anything. I'm just saying that if we think more deeply about quitting, we'll end up in a different place. And so the website has said there's a way to get ahold of me there. So, and I hope that people will at least think about it a little more. And I think they'll come to the conclusion as I hope that people will at least think about it a little more and I think they'll come to the conclusion as I did that it's that it's vaster than I ever ever imagined when

I embarked upon this. Julia Keller, pleasure to have you on. Thank you. Thanks so much, Dan. Thanks again to Julia Keller. Great to talk to her for much more on this topic. Check out our episodes with Simone Stahlshoff, Bruce Filer and Amy Edmondson. Those are three separate episodes that we will post links to in the show notes. Thank you for listening. Go give us a rating or a review. I know a lot of hosts ask for that, but there's a reason we do. It really helps us with the algorithms. So please do that if you've got a second.

Thank you most of all to everybody who works so hard on this show 10% of happy years produced by Justine Davey Gabrielle Zuckerman Lauren Smith and Tara Anderson DJ Kashmir is our senior producer Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor Kevin O'Connell is our director of audio and post production Kimmy Regler is our executive producer Alicia Mackey leads our marketing and Tony Magyar is our director of podcasts, Nick Thorburn of Islands wrote our theme. If you like 10% happier, I hope you do, you can listen early and ad free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad free on Amazon Music.

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