On Quitting
Scratching the itch.
Quitting feels good.
I don’t mean quitting feels good after a long day in the ring (because you’re totally a boxer, and this is totally a good analogy). I mean quitting when you’re in the middle of something, usually a long, difficult thing. Quitting feels like scratching an itch you feel in your bones.
The need to quit feels like an insatiable hunger that can only be quenched by yielding to the inertia of the universe. Before you think I’m a hand-wavy type (I am), I’ll explain.
The natural state of things is chaos. Things break down, scatter, effectively disappearing. The best we can usually do to combat entropy is nothing. It’s why laying on the couch doesn’t suck, BUT it doesn’t feel good either.
Things that feel good decrease momentary personal entropy but increase, or at least have no effect on the everpresent broader entropy of our lives. Things like drinking a beer feel GOOD. You get a momentary respite from your thoughts, maybe it tastes good (assuming you’re not drinking an IPA) + you get to scratch a dopamine itch. But if you’re me in college, no, especially if you’re me in college, you know that drinking a beer creates entropy.
I could expect to send 3 text messages I’d regret, burn at least 1 bridge, and this is all ignoring the hangover. I created ENTROPY.
Drinking is on the nose, but the point is this, we do a lot of things that feel good right now, but have fallout. Often that fallout is not as acute or obvious as something like what I’ve described above, but like most of our problems, that lack of apparency keeps us coming back for more, never able to learn from our consequences because we don’t really feel them.
This is why people’s lives fall apart without them realizing it. What feels like a discreet, forgettable decision to buy those drugs, lash out at that friend, skip that workout coalesce into ruin when done enough times over a long enough time.
Now back to quitting, what the h*ck am I talking about.
Quitting feels good for the same reason those things feel good. You get an immediate, noticeable, enduring reprieve from stress. From work. From reducing entropy.
When you do things, create things, build things, systematize things, you reduce entropy. If the natural state of the universe is entropy, you are defying the laws of nature. You are creating order out of chaos, and that shit’s kinda hard.
To rattle a few of the dozen or so endeavors I’ve quit too early, most that I started 15+ years ago:
Minecraft youtube channel (I was among the first 100 channels making Minecraft videos)
Skits youtube channel (again, I was super early to this)
Call of Duty Youtube channel (early)
Affiliate marketing empire (on time but still)
Motocross vlogging (on time)
High school rock n roll band (early)
Acting (worried about my image, which didn’t really exist as a chubby, heavily OCD’d 14 year old, never gave it a real shot)
Fitness youtube channel (early)
Vlogging (early)
Writing (early)
Here’s an old skit:
Here’s an old Call of Duty video of mine:
Most of these have a low probability of success, sure, but none of them are particularly difficult. Pick any one of these. There is both a skill and a luck component.
The skill grows over time, the luck, is actually not luck, but more of a simple algorithm: Input x Time x Growth Rate.
You control Input, you wait for Time (yeah lol), and with the internet and social media, the Growth Rate is taken care of. Building something out of nothing isn’t complicated, it’s just hard to stick with because we get impatient and frustrated with how slow growth is at first, and that’s the rub.
We Want The Treehouse
The best way for a plant to die is to stop watering it. And if your goals are plants, all you have to do is water baby! Big ass trees start a relatively small ass seeds. Your big ass goal tree is a small little bitch ass seed, and you’re too lazy to water it every day? Shame.
We don’t notice any growth when it’s just a sapling trying to break through the dirt. You can’t build a treehouse on dirt. That’s just a house. That’s lame. Dogs have those. We want a tree house now. 90% of people quit here.
If you make it past the the dirt breach, you are not out of the woods, or I guess there aren’t any woods. This is where things actually get hard. To avoid a bunch of caveats, I won’t get too specific, but in general, we start looking around. Tree, tree, tree, and then you look at your sapling and you get impatient. If this was actually a tree in nature, you’d just have to wait, but in my analogy, I make the rules, and you have to water it every day. It’s cold, you’re busy, you’re tired, and you have to go get your watering can, fill it up, get your hands wet because the hose leaks at the spigot, and sit and water.
Eventually you stop showing up on the hard days. You water 90% of the time, the tree is still growing.
But again, we all get that itch. It starts as that motivation spigot (using that word twice in one blog is insane) drying up. Then you start looking around at the opportunity cost of showing up. Then you skip 2 days in a row. Then you convince yourself you don’t even really want a treehouse or you don’t know how to build one and you’re over your skis. Maybe you remember someone who told you it would be hard and you start to believe them. Maybe it requires identity reconstruction and you’re just too comfortable with your current mediocrity to risk a little discomfort. These all create that itch to surrender—I mean you’re a losing army and the forces of entropy are unrelenting, so you stop, and you feel good.
Here’s the problem with that model though. You have just become a loser. Winners, despite what tik tok will tell you, are not lucky, or born looking a certain way, or special in some way you can’t be. They’re people who created order out of entropy.
Turning Nothing Into Something
How hard would you say it would be to turn $250k into $10,000,000? I don’t mean you’re gifted $250k and everything is hunky-dory. I mean take you, right now, with your habits, job, schedule, relationships, and problems. Shit, I’ll make it easy for you, maybe I do mean that everything is hunky-dory. Let’s say you’re single, childless, make $100k/yr ($70k after taxes). You know what, I’ll make it EVEN EASIER for you: I’ll tell you what to do.
You just need to stick that $250k into an index fund, put away another $25,000 a year, and assuming the market returns like 6-7% a year, you’ve done it.
No problem right?
70k post-tax income
-30k rent
-10k bills/food
= 30k left over to invest
You work, pay bills, and save. That’s your life. Wait, that’s your life? That doesn’t sound that fun. What about going out? What about buying stuff? What about living? Well, you gotta give that all up for a 44 bagger, and this is assuming the economy cooperates, no emergencies happen, etc. etc.
My point is, getting a 44 bagger over even 40 years is non-trivial and requires a good amount of sacrifice.
Let’s take an extreme example: Donald Trump because I want to make this article appeal to as many people as possible (sarcasm). Donald Trump said he started with $1,000,000. If you read the accounts by people who hate Donald Trump, they’ll say he started with $67,000,000.
Regardless of what he started with, his net worth is somewhere in the $3,000,000,000 range. That’s a 44x from 67 bones, which isn’t insane when compared to true rags to riches stories, but 44x is pretty crazy.
I just told you like 45 seconds ago how to get a 44 bagger, but once you start getting richer, there aren’t obvious places to get an ROI that 6-7%/yr deterministically. 7% of $100,000,000 is $7,000,000. I suppose you could put all your money in the stock market, but at that level of wealth, putting 100,000,000 eggs in one basket is not an amazing idea. Wealth preservation becomes adversarial to wealth creation. This isn’t a finance post, but when you have more money, it’s usually harder to double it.
My point is, Donald Trump didn’t do nothing for his fortune. He did a lot. It’s at a minimum a lot of sacrifice and risk, and realistically a lot of hard work. You take $250k or $67MM (basically the same thing lol), you commit to watering it over decades (don’t water your money), you are probably mostly unhappy for the first N years, and you reap.
How To Not Quit
I haven’t cracked the code on not quitting, but I’ve definitely cracked my code.
For me, it’s regret and shame. I’m an inherently shameful person, so I avoid being ashamed of myself by not doing things that make me ashamed of myself. I’m not a millionaire right now. I’m 29, I could be making a lot of money in tech, but instead I spent most of my 20s half-committed to both my career and to founding startups, which I’ve more or less combined into one fun, decently-paying adventure, however on paper, I’m basically right where I was at 23, but with a lot more experience and regret.
I still have a good job, mostly by virtue of having met people and being smart, but I’m not satisfied with myself. I believe self-esteem is the delta between who we are and who we believe we should be, and while I’ve closed that gap, there’s still a chasm where there should be crack.
I’ve stopped quitting though.
I have a mountain bike youtube channel that I post on ~weekly.
I have a rock n roll band that I’ve finally committed to growing, including spending hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours a month on Instagram here, Spotify here.
I went all in on a start up in 2022, and while we kind of failed (I’ll write about this and the 5 year journey leading up to it in another post), I sent it, and that’s kick ass.
I will hopefully be spooling up another project with my brother (coming soon).
I will be writing here a couple times a month.
Quitting is pernicious. Quitting feels good. We scratch that itch, we stop creating order and let entropy run its course, but creating order creates value and makes us feel good about who we are, and quitting just makes us feel good for a little and then bad for a while. Pick your regrets wisely.