The decision to flee came suddenly

Why quitting can be the best thing you ever do

This article is about quitting, and why you should do it more often than our societal norms suggest. Allow me to explain…

This quote doesn’t go with this movie. Who knows where the quote came from..?

A recommendation for the ages

A few days ago Mike Green started recommending my Substack to his readers. That’s the big news. Maybe it doesn’t mean much to you but for me it’s a big deal. I’m intellectually indebted to Mike since he’s played a key role in my journey of becoming un-stupid in my thinking about markets, society and the political process.

Listening to one-hundred hours of his interviews has granted me a formidable foundation upon which to build my decision-making process as an investor. So getting a hat tip from Mike is awesome, and an event that I’m especially proud of since I started the Unhedged Capitalist without a foot in the door. Everything that’s happened here has been the result of perseverance, hundreds of hours of work and heaps of help from lots of people. Yet what got me to this point wasn’t a lifetime of headstrong perseverance, it was quitting other activities so that I had the time to pursue this thing that matters.

When to quit

Tl;dr - If you’re serious about a new pursuit, depending on how diligently you apply yourself you can probably tell whether it’s going to work within 6 months to 2/3 years. If you’re making an honest effort but the progress isn’t materializing, you might want to consider quitting. All that bullshit they paste on classroom walls about never giving up and being anything you believe you can be, etc. Well, perseverance is only half the story. The other half is knowing when to throw in the towel so that you can find an activity that suits you better.

I didn’t wake up one morning when I was nineteen years old and decide to enter the highly lucrative field of writing glorified blog posts to keep the larder laden. Oh no… The first “professional skill” that I seriously attempted was producing electronic music. A family member bought me a copy of Fruity Loops and I spent several hundred hours learning how to produce EDM.

Reader let me tell you, I gave it my best. Not one for dabbling, I was at it five or six days a week. My reverb game was tight, my white noise fade ins perfected, my gallery of aftermarket synthesizers robust. Didn’t matter. Progress was mind numbingly slow, sometimes non-existent, and I felt like the entire endeavor was akin to fighting in a basement. So fuck it, I stopped.

A few years later I elevated an interest in poker into an obsession. I started playing online every day. I bought the books and I still have them, dusty spines taking up space on the back bookshelf. I took notes after every session and sought wisdom from the pros. Phil Galfond, as I recall, was putting out some excellent instructional content at the time. And once again I gave it my all and at the end of six months, well, I was almost certainly worse than when I started. I could foresee no circumstance in which my lack of skill would change so fuck it, I stopped.

I’ve had many years to reflect on those decisions, what do I think now? With the power of hindsight I wouldn’t change a thing. Quitting poker and EDM freed my time for pursuits more fitting my character and innate skill set. One cannot write and tune amplifier settings at the same time.

As a counter example, let me tell you about one of the most depressing life situations I ever witnessed on film. It was a documentary about weightlifting that featured a segment on a ~45-year-old man living out of his van. This guy had dozens of supplements, the protein shakes and perfectly portioned chicken cutlets. He was showering in the locker room, nearly killing himself in the gym five days a week in the vain hope that one day he would go pro. Win the right competition, have his breakthrough moment, become the next Arnold. But mate, if it was going to happen it would have happened 20 years ago… That man, in my opinion, was wasting his energy on a dream that had almost no chance of ever coming true.

We lionize hustle culture. Instagram is saturated with all capped quotes about never giving up, visualizing goals, freeing yourself from doubt and whatever other platitudes look good against a backdrop of waterfalls and tall cliffs. While I certainly agree that perseverance is insanely important, firstly you’ve got to understand whether the thing you’re persevering at has a good chance of actually working.

Maybe if I had stuck with EDM I could have produced a couple of decent songs, opened for a few bigger artists, who knows. But based on my ridiculously slow progress the odds that I would have ever amounted to much were awfully slim. Quitting music gave me the time I would need to write, write, write and read the several hundred books that would ultimately allow me to splatter sorta smart statements on Substack.

Unless something drastic changes I would be insane to quit this gig. Since I started taking it seriously, about three months after launching, progress has been nothing but up and to the right. Having a recommendation from the knowledgeable Mr. Green will likely bring me to an even higher level of growth. I look forward to that, and short of a crippling motorcycle accident or undiagnosed aneurysm I have every intention of being here next month and fifty months from now too.

Conclusions

I’m not a super sharey person, which perhaps explains why I don’t have Facebook or Instagram. I feel a bit weird writing a post all about myself, but my intention is to illuminate a key truth that is dreadfully missing from our cultural discourse.

A few people get lucky and stumble upon their natural skill at an early age. Statistically speaking though, it’s more likely that the first thing(s) you try won’t work. I mentioned poker and EDM, but there was even a third activity I spent eighteen feverish months on with a near religious zeal. A fascinating story in its own right, but not for today. I gave that up too because the progress wasn’t there, and once again I have no regrets.

It’s OK to quit. First you have to give it everything you’ve got. You really need to try, but if you’ve done the work and the results just aren’t there it might be time to try something else. When you do stumble upon the winning formula the experience of continual upward progress is awesome, and you’ll know it when you see it. That’s the game, to find that thing. Get after it, and don’t get held back by what doesn’t matter.

Stay frosty friends.