In Praise of Quitting
In the famous Milgram experiment people were forced to choose between obedience to authority and following their conscience. Obedience won most of the time. It’s scary. See also the Stanford Prison Experiment and the BBC Prison Experiment.
With that background, I’m going to take a long leap: goals. I think one cause of the world’s ills is people being obsessed with setting and achieving goals. By obsessed, I simply mean treating the fulfillment of a goal as good in itself, rather than good because the goal was worthwhile and better than any alternative. This leads to doing things that you might come to believe are bad or hurtful, but you do them because you “promised” or, worse, you “promised yourself.”
You may think it’s bad to “be a quitter” and that “follow-through” is an important skill. I disagree. Follow-through is not a skill, it’s just a natural consequence of finding something to be worth doing and investing in it because it’s worth doing. And meanwhile, to promise yourself something is to enslave your future to the wishes of a younger, stupider you. In the chilling social experiments I cited above, the participants enslaved themselves to a duty. This may be important in order for a group of people to get things done quickly, but we must approach it with care. We must not let ourselves become robots who process any arbitrary goal as input, regardless of how it hurts ourselves or others.
Being obsessed with goals fixes our minds in the future and encourages us to devalue the present. It also cuts ourselves off from full contact with what’s happening. Maybe a better goal will suggest itself to us, but whoops, we’re already committed to a different goal and we don’t know how to switch. We’re on automatic pilot.
In my way of learning, quitting and procrastination play a big role. Procrastination gives me room to reconsider. Quitting opens me up to new possibilities. When I quit I am telling my past self, “No, you don’t own me. I own myself, here and now.”
I actually do have goals, but I have them in the sense that some people have cats: pets that come and go. I don’t feel bad when I don’t reach a “goal”, or at least, if I feel bad, it’s not because of the abstract notion of “failing to attain what was targeted”, but rather because I don’t get the direct benefit of that particular goal. The concept of a goal is useful, especially when I’m explaining why I do what I do, but I ignore all the morality and I deny all the nobility of achievement for the sake of achievement.
So throw away your “bucket list.” If you want to visit Italy before you die, then go ahead, but not because it’s on some damn list. Go because, on the day you made the reservations, you were curious to discover Italy, and that seemed to be the better use of your limited time of the planet. And if get there and find you don’t like Italy, by all means cancel the trip, or head to Switzerland, instead.
It took me 26 years to write my Buccaneer-Scholar book. I’m glad I didn’t rush it. I became the person capable of writing it only a few years ago. I know that now. You might tell me “James! But you can’t take so long to produce work! How will you live?” Of course, I did other things instead of writing that book. I was not idle. I have many projects going at once.
Tell your past self to go live in the past, and leave your present alone!
James,
Aswell as many other thougths, this one I specially share with you. If there is one thing I don’t understand is this obsession many people have with were will you be 5 years from now. I usually answer that I hope that I’m alive, healthy and getting along with my life. The weird thing is that when I say this people usually seem disappointed, they are always exepecting that I say that I’ll be working on a big company, earning lots of money and all of that stuff.
I believe that we instead of making high hopes about the future we should go on life, step by step, not rushing anything. Usually we’ll get somewhere totally different from where we expected, that’s what happened to me at least, but I don’t regret a thing I did or path I took. And as you said there should be no regret because its with the failures that we can learn the most.
Thanks, and pardon for any spelling mistakes
Comment by Rafael Sartor — June 4, 2009 @ 9:49 pm
There are contexts where keeping my word is more important; there are contexts where keeping my word is less important. There’s an old SF novel called /We All Died at Breakaway Station/ (I think I’ve got the title right) where there’s a first-contact alien who never answers to the same name twice. He *isn’t* who he was the last time you talked to him, and he *knows* it–or that’s one interpretation of what’s going on in his head.
If you don’t keep your word at least some of the time you are going to have a hard time finding people willing to maintain a relationship with you. If you don’t keep a consistent enough personal history (including promises) going on, if it gets bad enough, you’ll be adjudged insane. I lived for three years in the entirely too-close company of a person like that.
Having said that, there are two heuristic phrases I try to use to defuse my over-attachment to things I think of as commitments that serve as binds, double binds, or worse: “Who told you that?” and “Nobody /asked/ you to /do/ that.”
[James' Reply: A promise to someone else is different from a promise to yourself. In fact, I don't think it is possible to make a promise to yourself. The self that made the promise instantly ceases to exist, and the self being promised to hasn't existed yet. There's no meeting of minds.
I often do things because I don't want to let other people down. That's different from having a goal for a goal's sake.]
Comment by Michael M. Butler — June 4, 2009 @ 11:15 pm
Thank you for making this post. I often get grief from people about lack of “follow-through”. It’s good to be reminded that I’m not that crazy for thinking this.
Comment by Jason Wynja — June 4, 2009 @ 11:58 pm
Hi James,
a few weeks ago I saw a TED talk (http://www.ted.com/talks/philip_zimbardo_on_the_psychology_of_evil.html) by Philip Zimbardo, the guy who did the Stanford Prison Experiment.
He shows what might be tipping points to actually “quit” (or start) doing something bad.
Comment by Markus — June 5, 2009 @ 5:34 am
While I certainly don’t think “autopilot” is a worthwhile navigation technique for life, I also DO think that setting goals for ourselves is important.
For the people who remain on autopilot, I would imagine that sticking to a goal no matter what is probably the least of their issues. Setting goals but never revisiting them is counter-productive. Setting goals and viewing them within the context of an ever-changing life and circumstances is the ideal.
Call it quitting, call it changing course, call it whatever you want to, but living only in the present can be just as damaging as living on autopilot.
[James' Reply: Can you say more about that? I don't see the problem you apparently see.
I do understand how failing to set little goals can create a problem in day-to-day life. For instance, if I need to catch a plane at 10am, I better have the goal of waking up before 7am. I look upon those as trivial and obvious kinds of goals. They don't seem worth talking about.
What I don't understand is how big goals are necessary. Maybe I'm having a mental block, but I don't think I live by big goals. Yes I have aspirations. I'd like to make a documentary, for instance. But I wouldn't say that's a goal. I'm not planning for it, and even if I did do some planning, I would do that with the awareness of many alternative and incompatible aspirations that may drift in and capture my attention.
I live by passion, not so much by planning. You can smirk about that, but I'm living proof that one can live this way and be comfortable.]
Comment by Dave — July 21, 2009 @ 10:37 am