James' World 2

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Cece Xie doesn’t mince words. “I really do think that I hate quitting,” the 32-year-old says. Although she was raised with the notion that quitting was bad, somehow, the lawyer and writer became an advocate for quitting. She never quite pictured a career outside of law, but when Xie connected with a literary agent, she began to imagine an alternate future, one as an author, beyond the large law firm where she was a sixth-year associate. The problem was, she never had time to work on her book proposal. “The fact that my current career was getting in the way of me even working on this book proposal at all,” Xie says, “I kind of came to a fork in the road, and I was like, it’s stupid for me to not pursue this thing just because I have a career that I have spent time on.”

So, in early 2022, she quit. Stepping away from her day job afforded Xie the time to not only finish her proposal, but to sell it. Now, she has the time and mental space to work on the manuscript and start a new law firm with a former coworker. “It’s kind of fun,” she says, “to just see where life leads and follow the possibilities in a way that I don’t think I ever let myself, or that corporate structures really don’t allow you to do.”

The act of quitting has earned notoriety. In American culture especially, those who give up on a practice, a hobby, or a goal are considered unambitious, lazy, even a failure. In the book Quitting: A Life Strategy, author Julia Keller traces the origins of the negative view of quitting to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. Success was equated with hard work and perseverance through adversity. “If you weren’t successful, it just meant you didn’t work hard enough,” Keller says. “That very much served the interests of the people in power, because if you want to say to people, ‘Well, the reason you’re still poor and downtrodden is because you didn’t work hard.’”

Success is hardly won on grit alone. Rather, Keller argues, quitting can help you achieve your goals just as effectively as perseverance. “You abandon old ways and embrace new ways,” she says, “you abandon old things and do new.”

Instead of being seen as a failure, quitting can be an opportunity to reclaim time and to rethink passions, relationships, and accomplishments. There is power in abandoning what no longer serves you — that is, if you’ve given it a fair shot.

“You can’t just be pursuing all the time,” Xie says, “without quitting.”

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Pete Gamlen for Vox

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