📌 Two kinds of quitting

Most people carry a list in their head of things they are not good at. It is usually long, and it is usually the first thing that surfaces when someone asks what you might do next. The list of what you already know how to do is shorter, quieter, and almost never comes to mind at all. That is not modesty. That is just how memory works.

By the end of this, you will:

There are two different things people call quitting, and mixing them up causes a lot of unnecessary guilt.

The first is setting something down for now, meaning to come back to it. The second is putting it down for good. Researchers who study this found something worth knowing: the things people set down for now tend to be the ones that still matter to them most. You do not shelve what you never cared about. You shelve what you are not ready for yet.

They also found that older adults do not abandon more goals than younger ones. Not more. The idea that you reach a certain age and start giving things up faster than everyone else turns out not to hold.

If you have started something online and stopped, more than once, you have probably filed that under failure. I would ask you to file it somewhere else.

Holding onto something out of obligation, or because you are worried how it looks to walk away, is the version that actually costs you. Researchers have found that keeping a goal you no longer find fulfilling, out of guilt, predicts stress and lower well-being. Letting it go for your own reasons does not.

So the question is not whether you quit. It is whose reason you quit for.

There is a story I keep coming back to. In 2000, a small mail-order DVD company offered to sell itself to Blockbuster for fifty million dollars. It was losing money and looked, to the people in that room, like a niche hobby for movie buffs who did not mind waiting for the mail. Blockbuster passed. Some accounts say the executives could barely keep from laughing.

I want to be fair to those people. Nobody, including the founders of Netflix, knew what that company would become. Turning down an unproven idea is not automatically a mistake. But dismissing something because it looks small or unfamiliar, without really looking at it, is a habit worth noticing in yourself.

You do that to your own experience more often than you would think.

Here is the whole thing. Get a piece of paper.

Write down three things people have paid you to do. Not job titles. Actual tasks. Not "I worked in insurance" but "I explained to frightened people what their policy actually covered."

If nothing comes, try the other door: write down three things people have asked you for help with more than once. Family counts. Neighbors count.

That is it. Do not evaluate them. Do not decide whether they are interesting. Just get them out of your head and onto paper, where you can look at them like they belong to somebody else.

If you do it, you will probably be surprised by one of the three. There is usually one you would never have listed if you had been asked directly, because it is so ordinary to you that it does not register as a skill. That is often the useful one.

If you do not, nothing bad happens. The list stays in your head, where it has been, quietly not counting.

I have been working on a small free tool called What You Could Teach. You answer nine questions about work you have already done, and it shows you what you could teach somebody else, along with an outline for a short guide to teach it.

It is not ready today. It will be here on Saturday. I am mentioning it now only because the paper exercise above is the same exercise, done by hand – and doing it by hand first will make Saturday better.

If you did the paper exercise, hit reply and send me the number of items you got to. Just the number. One, two, three. Nothing else, and no explanation needed.

I read every one, and there is no wrong answer – including zero.

Talk soon,
Bob

A short story from my place, about the dog who gets me out the door every morning at 78 – no sales in it.

#RetireAndRise #DigitalConfidence #StartingOver #OverFifty #seeyouatthebank