Quitting is not always surrendering
There are 4 reasons to let go, and each one requires a different response
Welcome to Mental Garden, a newsletter about creativity, focus, and systems for writing and building projects on the internet. To explore the full library, go here.
🏷️ Categories: Life lessons, Mental models, Decision making and biases.
One of the hardest decisions in life is deciding whether to keep going or to give up.
Perseverance is key, without a doubt. Almost everything that matters to us in life puts us through moments of doubt, frustration, and days when we feel that nothing is moving forward. In those moments, pushing on despite everything often makes the difference between success and failure.
But be careful: this “never give up” mindset can work against you.
Knowing when to quit is necessary for success. You need to know when to let go of what is not working and adjust your course. So the question is not only how to keep moving forward no matter what. The other big question, often ignored, is knowing when to step back or maneuver in time.
A useful way to understand this is to separate the reasons for withdrawal into four types.
Vital withdrawal
Tactical withdrawal
Strategic withdrawal
Situational withdrawal
Each type of withdrawal points to a different problem that may make stepping away worthwhile and, for that reason, each one requires a different solution to help you find your new path.
Let’s look at them one by one.
1. Vital withdrawal: the problem is the “why”
This first type arises when the goal we are pursuing becomes questionable.
These are reasons for giving up that have a deeper explanation; they have to do with the direction you want for your life. For example, Gandhi trained as a lawyer and could have followed an excellent professional path, fighting for rights through his legal career. However, his experiences in South Africa made him realize that this path no longer matched what he wanted to achieve. He wanted to mobilize people in the fight for their rights from the streets, not from an office (Tidrick, 2006).
From that point on, he took a different path and became the person we know today.
What matters in this story is that Gandhi stopped organizing his life around a socially valid career path and put it in service of a deeper moral conviction. He did not limit himself to fighting for rights in the conventional way. He decided to take action by speaking with ordinary people and protesting.
That is a vital withdrawal.
Living along a path that may work for society, but does not fit who you are inside. In those cases, withdrawing helps you move toward the life you truly want for yourself.
How to face a vital withdrawal
A vital withdrawal is a problem of why. Your life direction is not aligned with the actions you are taking.
Analyse your life: Few people stop to honestly think about what they want for their lives. Yet when you do not, it is easy to end up chasing other people’s goals: those of your family, your environment, your industry, your society, or your time.
Define what is non-negotiable: This will give you vision. You can change format, industry, model, or tools. What matters is not losing sight of the core of what you want to build. Gandhi wanted to fight for rights, but through a different path. Giving up the fight for rights was not negotiable.
Endure criticism: When you stop following the expected script, criticism appears. Still, other people’s disapproval is not a sign that your direction is wrong. Sometimes it only means that it does not match their expectations.
Let’s move on to the second type.
2. Tactical withdrawal: the problem is the “how”
The second type of withdrawal arises when execution fails.
These are system errors, problems in how things are being done. Maybe you are heading in the right direction, but that is not the way to move forward. James Dyson is a good example. His idea was good: to design a vacuum cleaner that would not lose suction power the way traditional bagged models did. The problem was in the how.
Dyson spent years building prototype after prototype (Martí, 2023).
Before finding a version that worked, he made 5,127 prototypes. He never changed his dream; he stayed faithful for years to what he wanted to achieve. What was failing him was the “how” of creating a vacuum cleaner. After many, many attempts, he got the answer he was looking for.
That is a tactical withdrawal: we change course because the method is failing.
It means withdrawing from one way of doing things in order to explore other possibilities.
How to face a tactical withdrawal
Document the process: If something depends only on your memory, your energy, or your improvisation, it is probably a mistake. Good results are almost always built on good systems that allow you to learn and improve.
Measure what matters: If you do not track things, you will not know which part of the process is working and which is not. Many people think they have one problem when in reality they have a completely different one. You cannot rely on impressions; you need real data.
Adjust: Everything can change. What worked a year ago may not work now. You need to look at the data from time to time in order to correct errors and explore new possibilities.
If you want to understand this entire process of continuous improvement in detail, take a look at this article in which we analyze how a legendary sushi master explains how to master any skill.
3. Strategic withdrawal: the problem is the “what”
The third type of withdrawal appears when you are betting on the wrong approach.
You know what you want to achieve and you know how to do it, but that plan will not lead to good results. Netflix illustrates this well. During its early years, it built a solid business around renting and mailing DVDs. It worked wonderfully, but as the internet improved and society’s habits changed, it became obsolete, and the business would have collapsed in the long term (Sorenson, 2013).
The company did not abandon its goal: to offer people movies in a convenient way.
What changed was the strategy. In 2007, Netflix bet on streaming over the internet. More transformations came later, but the decisive shift was understanding that they could do the same thing they already knew how to do, but through a different system.
They replaced mail with the internet.
That is a strategic withdrawal: you need to change the system you are working within.
In case there is any doubt, the difference between tactical and strategic withdrawal is simple:
Tactics: We are talking about how we do things to achieve objectives.
Strategy: We are talking about how we direct or manage a plan or undertaking.
Dyson was clear about the goal of achieving a better vacuum cleaner design, but he did not know how to get there. The way of making vacuum cleaners had to change.
At Netflix, they were clear about the goal of offering movies, but their mail-based system started becoming less profitable. The management system had to change, but not the movies.
How to face a strategic withdrawal
Test early: Many ideas look brilliant on paper, but not in reality. The sooner you test that new way of organizing yourself around your goal, the sooner you can anticipate the future consequences of not having changed.
Test cheaply: Testing new strategies at low cost is one of the best things you can do because, besides saving time, you will save resources. Run experiments with minimum viable designs, simple plans to see how they perform.
Sometimes, you are good at something, but you need to reinvent yourself so you do not fall behind.
4. Situational withdrawal: the problem is the “where”
There is a fourth type of withdrawal that many people ignore, and I think it is essential.
Sometimes, the problem lies in the circumstances or starting conditions. In factors that do not depend on you. In adverse situations that completely change what you can do, even if you have done things well.
I think of a childhood friend of mine who always loved volleyball.
From a young age, he dreamed of becoming a professional player. He trained hard for years, watched his diet, invested time and money, and even moved so he could train where volleyball is played at the highest level in Spain. He achieved excellent performance at a young age. He is a player with great potential, who has already competed against players from Spain’s first division and strong international teams.
However, at his best moment he began to feel pain in his knee.
After several medical checkups, doctors told him he had severe cartilage wear. The recommendation was harsh: if he wanted to avoid much worse consequences in the future, he had to reduce the intensity and give up high-level competition.
Here, neither effort, knowledge, nor life direction failed.
What failed was something unusual at that age. For some reason, while still very young, he developed a serious problem that other professional volleyball players may never face, or may only suffer at the very end of their sports careers, when they are already elite players.
That is a situational withdrawal.
The hard reality is that life does not deal the same cards to everyone. In those cases, withdrawing means accepting reality, protecting what can still be saved, and finding a new way to pursue the same goal or redirect yourself toward a different path.
How to face a situational withdrawal
Accept the real limit: There are cases in which a limit, event, or problem prevents us from moving forward, and insisting only makes things worse. You have to accept the limit and look for other alternatives, whether or not they are connected to the original goal.
Remember that it is not personal: In this type of withdrawal, you feel a terrible helplessness because the goal really did align with who you are. Maybe you knew very well how to do it, and you almost certainly had a good plan for achieving it. Yet a greater force compels you to withdraw with no remedy.
This type of withdrawal deserves much more attention than it usually receives.
Age, place of birth, income level, access to education, sex, genetics, accidents, and many other factors shape a person’s possibilities of achieving their goals. Out there are wonderful, hardworking, and highly capable people who do not receive the opportunities that others gain easily or simply take for granted.
That should always be remembered.
The right question
When something is not working, many people ask themselves: “Should I give up?”
That is almost never the best question. Instead, ask yourself: “What kind of withdrawal do I need?”
Is it a vital withdrawal? Then you need to rethink your direction.
Is it a tactical withdrawal? Then you need to change how you act.
Is it a strategic withdrawal? Then you need to change the way things are organized.
Is it a situational withdrawal? Then you need to recognize the limitations of the situation without confusing them with a lack of personal worth. It is time to redirect your path.
Not every reason for giving up means the same thing.
And not all of them are corrected in the same way.
Maybe you just need to step back in time to find a better path.
Want to learn more? Here are 3 related ideas to go deeper:
The garden rule: how to organize your life when you have too many interests
Do you feel lost? This was Richard Feynman’s answer to his student
✍️ Your turn: Have you ever had to face a major withdrawal in your life? What kind was it? When I talked about this with my volleyball-player friend, he turned the question back on me. “And what would you do if doctors told you that you could never write again?” His question made me think a lot, and I believe I would keep the Jardín Mental project alive through the podcast or video.
💭 Quote of the day: “We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.” — Joseph Campbell, Reflections on the Art of Living
See you next time! 👋
