That's it, I quit

And science backs me up.

Years ago, I wrote an article for Inc. about how I once quit a job after a single day.

This was a big moment for me: Coming clean about something in my professional life that I didn’t exactly brag about. However, people related to the story, and it went viral.

Truly, this became my 15 minutes-plus of fame. I wound up on national TV talking about the experience.

For a long time afterward, readers tracked me down on LinkedIn to lay out the facts of their employment or other situations, and ask if I thought they should quit and move on too.

In fact, I soon realized that I had spent far more time talking and writing about this short job experience than I spent actually working there. I even talked with my agent about turning the experience into a book.

We had a title: The Joy of Quitting.

Then, I set it aside.

The science of quitting

Is it the height of irony to start writing a book about quitting, only to quit?

Maybe. But, two things:

• First, this coincided with my pouring my all into building this newsletter, Understandably, which now has about 140,000 actual/valid subscribers even after my latest purge. I didn’t see how I could build that and write a book at the same time.

• Second, it turns out that perhaps that I was doing myself a favor, from a human development and wellness perspective.

I say this because of a massive new review of previous studies published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour that found that quitting difficult goals can in fact lead to joy—or, at least, to greater well-being than simply hanging on.

“Sticking with impossible goals can take a real toll, with previous research suggesting it can lead to higher stress, poorer well-being and even physical health costs such as illness,” explained lead researcher Hugh Riddell from the Curtin School of Population Health in Australia. “But letting go and—crucially—reengaging with new goals was found to restore purpose and well-being.”

Goal adjustment

We should focus on the second part of that last sentence, “reengaging with new goals,” because this isn’t meant to encourage people simply to give up when the going gets hard.

Rather, it’s more a question of “goal adjustment,” broken down into three distinct subcategories:

• Goal disengagement: Letting a goal go

• Goal re-engagement: Setting a new goal

• Goal re-adjustment: Various processes that enable modification of existing goals to render them more achievable

A “real job”

On a personal basis, I look back at the experience of putting aside that book (at least for the time being), and I realize that this is exactly what I did: I disengaged with one goal and then set a new one—another writing project that has worked out quite well.

For that matter, I can also look back at the experience of quitting that now-famous job after one day. It was a good job as an attorney with a six-figure salary and benefits—the kind of thing that hundreds of people applied for, and that many people make a career out of, in the same way.

It truly took just that one day for me to realize that I’d misjudged what the work would be like.

(It helped that during orientation, it became a running joke for each speaker to introduce themselves by calculating how much time they had until they could retire.)

So, while I went through both goal disengagement and goal re-engagement at high speed, it really was less about quitting and more about moving quickly toward what came next.

The joy of quitting

Did quitting ultimately lead to joy? Indeed, it did, although not in the way I’d planned.

First, I took on corporate writing projects quickly, which turned into a real business. It eventually evolved into the kind of work I do today, usually quite happily.

More important, working for myself meant I had the flexibility to pack up and move to New York a few months later, when I got together with my future wife.

We’ve now been married over 12 years and have a daughter, so I’d say it worked out.

I think many of us face decision points like this. Perhaps the real question is the one all those people started asking me on LinkedIn: How do I know when it’s time to quit?

That’s the next step for the the research, Riddell said: “finding out when exactly people should stick with their goals or change course, without giving up too early.”

Sounds like a goal worth seeing through.

Unless, of course, they find something better.

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7 other things

• Pete Hegseth “created risks to operational security” by sharing sensitive details about Houthi strikes over Signal, a new Pentagon inspector general report determined. A classified version of the report has been handed over to the Senate Armed Services Committee; an unclassified, redacted version will be made public on Thursday. (Fox News)

• The US has halted the processing of all immigration applications linked to 19 countries already subject to a travel ban, according to an internal official memo seen by BBC partner CBS News. Immigration agents have been told to “stop final adjudication on all cases”, and pause naturalisation ceremonies for migrants on the cusp of gaining citizenship. (BBC)

• When Patrolman Joseph Detwiler answered a call last December claiming that a man who looked like the assassin of a health insurance executive was eating breakfast at a McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., he was dubious. He didn’t use his siren as he drove to the restaurant. “I knew it was him immediately,” Patrolman Detwiler said in the courtroom where pretrial hearings are being held in the murder case against the man accused in the killing, Luigi Mangione. (NYT)

• An increasing number of middle-aged and older adults — especially those in their 40s and 50s — are lonely, according to a report released by AARP, a nonprofit advocacy group for older Americans. Among the loneliest are adults 45 to 49 years old (49 percent identified as lonely), as well as respondents who never married (62 percent); are not working (57 percent); or whose household income fell below $25,000 a year (63 percent). (The Washington Post)

• UK Justice Secretary David Lammy has announced the creation of new “swift courts” which will see a judge decide verdicts in thousands of cases where the right to a jury trial will be removed. As part of sweeping reforms to the criminal court system in England and Wales, the plans is to scrap juries in so-called either-way cases that would have a likely jail sentence of three years or less. (The Independent)

• Amazon announced Wednesday that it’s introducing a new AI-powered Fire TV feature that lets viewers jump to specific movie scenes on Prime Video simply by describing them to Alexa+. Amazon says you can describe the scene to Alexa by mentioning details like the actor or character’s name, or a memorable quote. Examples include: “Jump to the scene when John McClane says ‘come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs’” and “Jump to the card scene in Love Actually.” (Tech Crunch)

• Pesky glitches that occasionally interrupt video calls could undermine success in everything from job interviews to sales pitches to court cases. Brief video freezes, lags, or audio echoes can create an unpleasant “uncanny” sensation that makes a viewer less likely to trust the person they’re interacting with through a face-to-face video connection, according to a series of experiments published in Nature. (NPR)

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Thanks for reading. Photo by Caleb Wright on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments!