In eighth grade, I joined the wrestling team. I gave it a semester and quit when I realized I wasn’t good enough and didn’t like it.

But isn’t quitting for losers?

Everyone says

• Work harder
• Give it time
• You’ll get better with practice
• You’ll learn to like it
• If you quit, you’ll never know how good you could be
• Do it anyway, it’s good for you

Well-intentioned advice, I’m sure, but is it right?

Ozan Varol says that sometimes quitting might be the best thing we can do:

I’m a professional quitter. After serving on the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, I quit rocket science and went to law school. After practicing law for a few years, I left to join academia. Most recently, I decided to quit that as well and give up the security of tenure to double down on popular writing and speaking.

I quit things I don’t enjoy. I give up on ideas that fail to live up to expectations. I jettison projects that no longer serve me or my mission in the world.

He acknowledges that many people quit too soon and never find out what they might have accomplished. “Yet many people persist when they should quit,” he says.

If you continually fail at something, or resist doing it, it might be a sign that you should stop doing it.

Varol notes that when we continue doing things that aren’t working for us, aside from being unhappy, we pass up the opportunity to do something else, something we might be great at and love.

Those of us who have changed careers and found success doing something else know this is true.

And what’s true for careers can also be true for work projects, marketing methods, and marriages. Quitting may not only be a viable option, it might be the best one.

So, what would you like to quit today?