Dear Dad,
We should not celebrate quitting.
Maybe I was raised under a rock but I don’t think I had ever heard of “Quitting Day” until this year. Then I heard about it a lot. Apparently, the average person “quits” their New Year’s resolution by the second Friday of January, which is now commemorated as “Quitting Day.”
From what I’ve observed it now stands as a day where people commiserate, justify, and casually laugh at their unsuccessful attempts to set goal, make a change, or accomplish something that as determined by them would have changed their life for the better in 2025. Quitting Day is lighthearted. It’s facetious. It’s defensive humor. But it’s a problem.
In tenth grade I called home. It was the winter of my first year at boarding school and I could barely hold back the tears that would eventually come. I was done with wrestling. I could not take it anymore. I dreaded each day. I hated practice and I hated matches. I told you and Mom that I planned to quit the team. I remember Mom told me, “I think you should stick it out to the end of the season then make a decision about next season, but if you quit mid-season you will set a standard to embrace quitting.” I hung up the phone disappointed. It was not the advice I wanted to hear. I finished the season and then decided to retire. Eventually, I unretired and completed an adequate high school wrestling career.
But boy was Mom right, and am I glad that at 16 years old I took a stance against quitting. Quitting is a zero sum game. After you quit once it becomes easier to do again. On the flip side, perseverance has the same effect. Be assured, whichever habit you feed will permeate all aspects of your life. During college football conditioning my foot always made it to the line before the whistle to start the next sprint, even when other teammates heads were buried in trashcans, because I had a pre-downloaded mindset of perseverance. When the whistle blew it was time to run. The long nights, intense pressure, and rigorous demands of law school were conquered with a smile because I was comfortable with discomfort and had learned to find joy in the battle. Everything I do, and everything we do, is subsequently influenced by prior decisions to quit, or not to quit.
Quitting New Year’s resolutions is a commitment problem that has dug its claws into our collective psyche. We struggle to keep commitments to ourselves and each other. I don’t write to argue for a universal rule against data-driven decisions to change the course of a career, fitness, or personal goal, which takes wisdom worthy of cultivating and nurturing; however, our casual sneer toward commitments has got to stop. Less we become a population of unaccomplished babies bathing in mediocrity.
I’m on edge this morning. Don’t get me started about participation trophies. Turns out, Mom had something to say about those too!
With Love,
JSR
