Julia Keller
speaker
56 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Julia Keller’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
I believe that everything we've always believed about quitting is wrong, and all the good things we've believed about grit and perseverance is also wrong. That quitting, and modern neuroscience bears me out on this, quitting is when we stop one direction and go in another.
Oh, hi there, Mike. So happy to be here.
I believe deep in my soul that everything we've always believed about quitting is wrong. And all the good things we've believed about grit and perseverance is also wrong. That, in effect, we've been sold a bill of goods. That quitting, and modern neuroscience bears me out on this,
is think i'd like to think of it as aerobics for your brain quitting is when we stop one direction and go in another it's a willingness to be flexible and there's a cognitive flexibility involved and so people will say to me well if you're right and grit and perseverance aren't all they're cracked up to be and quitting can be a good thing then how come for all these hundreds of years we've been told the opposite you know the words where do you get off why are you so smart and what i usually reply is we can trace the history of the grit and perseverance idea
I often say that grit is a con. It's been sold to us like cars or cornflakes or smartphones. And there's a reason why we're told that everything is in our own hands and it's all up to us because it isn't.
And once we accept that and we realize that we often have to change course because bad things just happen to us, unexpected things happen to us, we become much freer, less judgmental of other people and less judgmental of ourselves, certainly. And we're able to live life a little freer, a little happier.
Well, the distinction you're making there is very important. In fact, that's one of the things that I had to really look at is say you're a parent and your kid comes to you and says, yeah, I want to quit the basketball team. I just don't want to do it. And you're a parent and you realize that, well, I think probably this kid of mine would rather sit home watching YouTube videos.
That kind of quitting is not what I mean. I don't mean the quitting as you say, just kind of like, well, I'm just tired of it. And a lot of the parents that I interviewed in the course of just kind of collecting my thoughts about why I think quitting can be a positive would say that that then initiated another conversation. They say, OK, why do you want to quit?
And if it is, as you mentioned a moment ago, just like, oh, I'm just tired of it. Come on. I'd rather sit at home, you know, box of Cheetos. Who wouldn't? That's not what I mean. What I mean is a, what I call precision quitting, strategic quitting.
And that can be whether you're, you know, 14 years old and you want to quit the soccer team or whether you're 44 and you are very stale in your job and you think you're looking for another challenge. It's really along the same thing. It's, and at each time it requires our brain to do something quite specific and quite important.
And that's the neuroscience of this, I think is maybe where the distinction lies as well. that we know that animals in the wild will quit if a certain path is not getting them where they want to go. And yet we don't. Often we stick too long with something. And it's not a matter of just lassitude or laziness. It's a matter, I think, of fear.
I know there's certain things that I haven't quit that I know I should have. And I'd like to say, well, because I just didn't want to do it. Often it's fear.
There is some of that, but I will tell you that in probably 150, 200 interviews, many, many, many interviews that I did, the vast, vast, vast majority of people, when I asked them to sort of tell me their quitting history, and everybody has a quitting story. That's something I should have mentioned at the outset. Everybody has a quitting story, and they love to tell it.
I know when I've been talking about the book, Hither and Yon, that's what comes out. people are much, much, much more likely to regret the things that they didn't quit, but they should have, than to regret the things they did quit. Obviously, there are some of the latter. There are times when we think, ah, I should have stayed with that job, wasn't so bad, or
I wish I'd stayed a little longer in that relationship, maybe give it another try. But the vast majority of people, it's completely the opposite. It's, I wish I hadn't stayed so long. I was afraid and that's why I stayed. And again, grit and resilience sometimes work okay. They're fine. It's not always true. There's no one formula that's gonna work for everybody or no one life strategy.
But my argument is that we need to include quitting and giving up and all these other words that have such a pejorative ring to them and sounds so negative. We need to put those into the toolbox. They need to be looked upon not as a moral failing and not as the absolute last refuge of the loser, but as another tool, another way to go about this very complicated thing called life.
Well, but you can, I would argue. I have a thing I call the quasi-quit. Now, this is not the same as quiet quitting, which came out about a year ago and to me sounds ridiculous. It's just thievery. It means not working very hard at your job. What I call the quasi-quit suggests that quitting doesn't have to be an on-off switch. I don't think it has to be a final thing.
I think of it as more of a rheostat dial. You can quit in increments. You can quit gradually. You can dial it up and dial it down. You can change the way you're doing something instead of the thing that you're doing. And I use a lot of athletes as an example. I mentioned Tiger Woods, I think is a great example, who is a great champion, a wonderful champion, but time has passed.
He's gone through some grievous physical injuries and some tumultuous emotional times. He has had to change what he thinks of as victory. He's not a quitter by any means, but in another sense, he is a quitter because he's had to quit a way of looking at the game of golf And looking at only a first place finish is the only acceptable outcome. And to say, you know what?
I showed up, I competed, I did my best. So quitting, I would argue, is not final. In fact, it's the opposite of final. You can quit a thousand times and make minor changes or one big major change. But again, it needs to always be in that toolbox and to always consider it and to realize if you quit, you're not a loser, you're not a bum, you're not a washout, you're not a terrible person.
Showing 1–20 of 56 · page 1 of 3
Next →