Below, Lindsay Crouse shares five key insights from her new book, The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out.
Lindsay is a marathon runner and journalist who worked at the New York Times for 15 years. Her reporting helped bring maternity rights to pregnant Nike athletes.
What’s the Big Idea?
Quitting isn’t failure. Knowing when to walk away from a goal that no longer serves us can free up the time, energy, and opportunity we need to build something better.
Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Lindsay herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.
1. Perseverance can work against us.
Perseverance is essential. That’s why our culture holds it in such high regard. But misplaced perseverance backfires. It can lead us to push too hard against dead ends, pouring ourselves into futile goals we don’t actually have the power to achieve.
When we fail to quit, we waste precious resources—energy, money, time—on pursuits that make us increasingly miserable, even as we fall short of what we want. Focusing on the work keeps us from registering the mounting costs, or even recognizing that we’re failing at all.
I spoke to a woman who poured a decade of her life and thousands of dollars from her savings into fertility treatments, only to finally accept that they weren’t working. She quit, and began rebuilding the life she’d put on hold. A year later, she became pregnant naturally. Despite the promises of those interventions, her fertility goal had never been fully in her control. I also spoke with a woman who pushed toward her dream of becoming an Olympian, even as her diligent training led to overtraining and injury, turning the sport she loved into an ordeal.
Both women had spent their lives learning to do hard things. But they hadn’t learned what to do when perseverance failed them. For both, quitting was the only realistic way out—no matter how much it felt like failure. Continuing would have only brought more failure. Quitting freed them to redirect their energy toward pursuits where they could succeed.
2. Fear of quitting is often misplaced.
When we contemplate quitting, we’re easily paralyzed by fear. Usually that fear centers on judgment: the worry that we made the wrong choice, that others will notice and think less of us.
But this fear is often proven to be unfounded. There’s a cognitive bias called the spotlight effect in which we tend to think that others are paying more attention to our choices than they actually are. I spoke with an actress who quit her career after noticing that everyone around her was putting their lives on hold for a dream they no longer truly believed in—largely because they’d already told everyone back home that they were going to be a star. She felt that pressure too. If she quit, what would everyone think? It turned out they thought the same thing as when she’d set out for Hollywood: Sounds great, we support you. People rarely care about what we do as much as we care about it ourselves.
“We tend to think that others are paying more attention to our choices than they actually are.”
Then there’s fear of our own judgment. What if we regret our decision to leave? But research shows that over the long arc of our lives, we tend to regret inaction more than action. Quitting is an action. It may mean taking a loss, but it also means opening yourself to new opportunities.
We should fear failing to decide more than the act of quitting itself. Kicking these decisions down the road to our five- or ten-year-older selves only leaves them with the same hard questions and even higher stakes. Quitting doesn’t get easier. We just become older.
3. Testing the waters usually beats a cannonball.
We often think of quitting as one blunt, seismic act—the day we’ve finally had enough and storm out in a rage. But that’s rarely the healthiest way to cut the cord. Instead of diving headfirst into a new life, we can wade in slowly.
In one research study, would-be entrepreneurs who kept their steady jobs while building a runway to their next step were more likely to succeed than those who quit outright. Knowing this helps counter the mental pushback of “I can’t quit,” because wading in mitigates the risk.
R&B legend Bill Withers is a great example of this approach. He was born into poverty in the segregated coal country of West Virginia and worked a series of jobs to support himself, eventually landing work in Los Angeles manufacturing toilet seats for airplanes. At the same time, he started playing guitar in clubs, exploring new interests. He discovered he was enormously talented, but he kept his factory job. Even after his breakthrough song, “Ain’t No Sunshine,” became a hit, he hedged his bets and kept making toilet seats. It was only after he was laid off that he realized he was ready to embrace his new career. By then, he had the gift, the confidence, and the financial foundation to succeed on his own terms.
4. Women’s endurance can become a weakness.
Women have specific physical, mental, and social qualities that help them endure more and quit less than men, especially in scenarios where conditions are harsh and the stakes are high. I wrote about this for the New York Times in 2018, after watching a Boston Marathon staged in freezing rain, where women finished at higher rates than men.
“We live longer than men, but we don’t live better.”
But is all this endurance good for women’s life outcomes? We live longer than men, but we don’t live better. Women are more likely to battle chronic pain, lie awake with insomnia, and suffer migraines. Women are catching up to men in rates of excessive drinking, and are more likely to take medication for anxiety and depression. Women graduate from school at higher rates than men, but our incomes are lower and we occupy fewer leadership positions. Motherhood complicates this dynamic further.
Is women’s ability to keep going at all costs something to celebrate? In a world that will demand as much as it can get from us, how can women learn to moderate our ability to persevere, before this strength begins to hold us back?
5. Quitting can be the path to better.
Remember the aspiring Olympian from the first insight—the one whose relentless perseverance led to injury and burnout? After she quit track, she didn’t run at all for years. She started a family. Got a regular job. Found other interests. Moved on. With time, her injuries healed. And then she started running again, just for fun.
Everything was different this time. Instead of running for medals, she was running for herself. Suddenly, she got faster and faster. Eventually, she set the national record in the marathon, reaching heights she’d never approached during her years of grinding pursuit.
The point isn’t that quitting is a comeback tool or a success hack. It’s that quitting deserves to be treated as a genuine option—far more than the never-give-up, keep-showing-up messages we’re so used to seeing blasted around us. We’re mostly conditioned to see quitting as a way to close a door, but that’s only half the story: it often opens doors in ways we can’t predict.
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