3 Reasons Why We Quit

Tl;dr: don’t talk about your goals, use discipline, and gratification to remain motivated and make it too costly to quit.

How many times have you started a project and never finished it?

In this post, I’d like to give three reasons behind quitting in the early stages of an initiative, as well as one trick to avoid doing so.

First Reason

Did you ever have big dreams, big plans for the future, or a brilliant idea, and the excitement just made you tell everyone about it?

I did too, and every time I told someone about my plan, I felt less motivated to start working to do it and the plan would eventually end up…nowhere.

I was as much aware of this psychological effect as I was aware that telling everyone I was going to do something my parents had promised would be a guarantee to see that thing canceled last minute.

However, what I didn’t formerly know was that telling people about my own goals had a demotivating effect and would increase the chances of making me quit, as explained by Derek Sivers in this TED Talk.

In it, Sivers explains that when you tell someone your goals, you trick your brain into a new social reality where the brain believes that the goal was reached as you were formulating it, hence decreasing your motivation to achieve it.

The brain, that idiot, mistook the talking for the doing.

This whole idea is somewhat linked to the concept that people create their reality by talking and thinking. When you hear about “mindset for success” or that kind of idiocies, it’s about creating your own reality where what you thought was impossible suddenly becomes possible simply because you thought it could be possible.

It’s what the book “The Secret” is all about.

The author explains that if you want to be rich, just imagine and behave like you already are until it becomes reality.

Tricking your brain into thinking you’re rich will make you act like a rich person and therefore, attract money.

It’s a “fake it until you make it”.

Sadly, in our case, verbalizing the goal won’t help you make it, but quite the opposite.

That’s the first reason why we quit early.

Second Reason

The second reason why we quit is not scientific, it’s just my own theory.

I believe we can find the strength to achieve our goal from several “motivators”, such as…motivation, discipline, passion, frustration, etc.

Motivation is a rather big “motivator”: who knows how many motivational videos are there on Youtube or the number of books that have been written on the topic.

The problem with motivation is that it is an emotion, and like all emotions, motivation is flaky and uncontrollable.

As such, relying on motivation to do something will work only as long as you remain motivated.

Once you lose motivation…you quit.

Passion is another “motivator” that gets people to do things: Mary started painting because that’s her passion, Stacey started twerking because that’s her passion and Erik started playing the piano because that’s his passion.

Passions get people to do things and “find your passion” may be one of the most over-used advice given to graduates and young people in general.

“Find your meaning” would be more appropriate.

While passion is more reliable than motivation, it won’t get you far into your projects because passion is based on pleasure which we get as long as the passion does not evolve into something too complicated, or too monotonous.

In one sentence: passions are for the weekend, not for the week.

It’s interesting to talk with people that have made their passion their job: chefs with cooking, musicians with playing music, and taxi drivers with driving.

Many of them stopped being “passionate” about their passions as they metamorphosed into work, with annoyances, long hours, (not enough) money, and annoying people to deal with.

Hence passion is not quite a reliable “motivator” for initiatives either.

We’re getting therefore to our third “motivator”: discipline.

Discipline is based on nothing but your mental strength.

Discipline is the idea that whatever happens, whatever the mood, the weather, or the fatigue state, you will do what you said you would do.

Discipline is the greatest “motivator” and root for success because nothing can stop discipline, and so the goal is eventually reached.

It is, ironically, also the most difficult “motivator” to use.

Third Reason

The third reason why we quit is the lack of gratification.

I didn’t say pleasure, I didn’t say meaning, I said gratification.

I don’t especially enjoy helping my friends moving out, but it is gratifying because you see the accomplished result and your friends are happy.

I don’t get dopamine out of it, nor meaning: just gratification.

So how do we obtain gratification?

Well, I know for myself, but I’m not sure for you.

I know I get gratification out of difficult tasks.

I won’t like it if it’s easy or quick. I want it hard and difficult so that I feel entitled to the reward I get at the end.

I want to struggle.

I’m happy when I’m unhappy and the other way around.

I quickly fall in love with the bitchiest most drama-loving girls…and wouldn’t have it any other way.

I need it as much as I hate it, but it’s like that.

It’s the reason why I do these carnivorous and no-fap experimentations.

It is difficult, so it is gratifying.

To sum up, this part, avoid telling your goals, seek gratification in projects, and use discipline to fuel your initiatives.

“But Aurélien, discipline is hard, I can’t stop myself from eating when I open the fridge”.

Yes, it is hard, but the battle is not won in front of the fridge: it’s won in the supermarket.

If you don’t buy that chocolate cake, it won’t sit in your fridge.

There was a point in my life when I couldn’t stop myself from smoking weed so I just stopped buying some.

Boom, it was fixed.

Life is already difficult enough for you not to overcomplicate it.

If you can’t stop yourself from buying the cake, then avoid the cake alley or the shop altogether.

You see, I only eat meat and therefore only go to the butchery.

No need to go to the supermarket, thank you.

That’s how I stopped eating my daily kilo of Greek yogurt and became a strict carnivore: I stopped going to the supermarket.

One More Trick

I want to give one last trick on how to avoid quitting in the early stages of an enterprise even if you used gratification, discipline, and got your mouth shut. 

It works for me, hopefully, it will work for you too, so there you go: make it too costly to quit.

Make Quitting Too Costly

When I started this blog in February 2020, I wrote 14 articles within two weeks because I knew I had to trap myself into making it too costly for me to quit.

After two weeks and all these articles, I was no longer in a position to stop because I had spent a lot of time figuring out how to create a website, how to use WordPress, how to write content, I had spent money on the URL and had written all of these articles.

This effort, I must say was initially fueled by the excitement in the short-term…but sustained by discipline based on making it too costly to quit in the long run.

Quitting would mean I would have done all the work for nothing.

As such, I see quitting as being priced at the cost of all the efforts I’ve made to get where I am.

The more efforts you originally invest, the higher the price you’ll pay if you quit.

The Bottom Line

Don’t talk about your goals as if you do, it will make you less likely to achieve them and might make people jealous.

Help others achieving theirs instead.

Use discipline and gratification from the start of the project and invest directly a lot of efforts into your initiatives so that it would be too costly to quit.

Of course, while I’m all about perseverance, you shouldn’t insist to do something that is clearly not working.

We should always support people in their projects and very rarely discourage them, unless what they do is bad for themselves.

Picture credit: Photo by Paola Chaya on Unsplash