On Quitting

I've experienced a lot of frustration with Chelleline Cards over the past year and a half, mostly due to losing touch with many customers due to our two moves - first from Montreal and then from Raleigh. I've contemplated going back to the work force - which, to be honest, sounds really wonderful at this point - but in our new town, there really aren't any jobs for me. I also don't really know what kind of job I would look for if I were to go back to the rat race. In the past year, I've looked for advice on when you should throw in the towel, and have balked at almost everything I've read (quit if you're not making a full-time salary after 3 years, etc., etc.).

I also balked whenever someone suggested alternative career options for me. The truth is, there was also a part of me that didn't want to give up on Chelleline Cards. I'd given up on so many other things in my life. I gave up on becoming a scientist. I gave up on pursuing a Ph.D. in English and a career as a professor of literature - probably the only other job I would have loved as much as Chelleline Cards. I went to law school and decided not to pursue a law career. I gave up writing and with it, my childhood dreams of writing a novel. I started a great NYC cultural events blog, New York Brain Terrain, and stopped three years after I started it.

After all of this, I didn't want to give up on Chelleline Cards, too.
 
The truth is, only you know when it's time to quit. No one else can tell you that - not your parents, not your friends, not a book or online article.

In fact, the most useful piece of advice I read about quitting was from "Think Like a Freak", the new book by the authors of Freakonomics. They have a chapter called "The Upside of Quitting," and it was in the closing paragraph where I found was I was looking for:

"We might add that Winston Churchill, despite his famous advice to those Harrow schoolboys, was in fact one of history's greatest quitters.  Soon after entering politics he quit one party for another, and later he quit government altogether.  When he rejoined, he quit parties again. And when he wasn't quitting, he was getting tossed out.  He spent years in the political wilderness, denouncing Britain's appeasement of the Nazis, and was returned to office only when that policy's failure had led to total war.  Even in the bleakest moments, Churchill did not back down one inch from Hitler; he became 'the greatest of all Britain's war leaders,' as the historian John Keegan put it.  Perhaps it was that long streak of quitting that helped Churchill build the fortitude to tough it out when it was truly necessary.  By now, he knew what was worth letting go, and what was not."