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.
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Appearances
You're a human being and you're making another decision.
Well, I suppose that's between you and your friends and your therapist and whoever. I mean, but again, I think when we put this moral judgment upon it is what I'm is what I'm, I guess, most upset about when I looked at quitting. You know, I always talk about when I was, I was in grad school, I was 19 years old, I'd graduated from college early. I was, it was terrible.
I'd been about a month in grad school and it was very clear to me, this was terrible, this was awful. I had to get out of there, but I was so afraid of being called a quitter. I mean, it clutched at my guts, you know, the idea of being a quitter. Cause you know, I'd been, I loved sports and we all know what we call somebody who,
leaves before the game is over we call them a quitter and it's a taunt it's a mean jeer but this is when i first began to question this idea of quitting as being so bad when your body and your mind are telling you you need to be somewhere else why do we resist and one of the reasons i do is i as i suggest and as my research and my interviews uh kind of made clear to me was that
Quitting is something that serves people in power. It serves the people who have control in this world. Because if you look at quitting as a negative, you suggest that all power is in your own hands and that the people who have been successful in life have gotten there because they didn't quit. They were noble. They were intrepid. They were dedicated. They stayed the course.
Often they were just lucky.
Well, but ask yourself, Mike, why does the word quitting make you feel that? Why do you think I would never call Tiger Woods a quitter? I know what you mean. It was a hard sentence to write when I said Tiger Woods is a quitter. But then I go on to explain, of course, that quitting We think of quitting in a pejorative way, a negative way, and we've been trained to do that.
The word self-help was coined in the middle of the 19th century by a man named Samuel Smiles, who wrote a book called Self-Help with illustrations of character and conduct. And that's when this idea first got going that quitting is bad, changing course is bad, changing how you do something is bad.
You have to stick with something that you begin and never quit and never give up or you're a bad person. There was definitely a moral dimension attached to it.
and again i think that doesn't serve us as human beings very well because we sometimes we need to quit things relationships don't work out like women particularly have been not served well by this idea of quitting as being a negative they're told oh come on just stick with it stick with a little longer in terms of relationships jobs um often quitting is the right thing to do and we don't do it because we're afraid of that term quitter just just as you were saying it kind of made you you know shudder a little bit and recoil to think of tiger woods a great champion like a tiger woods being a quitter
The other example I give is Simone Biles when she withdrew from the finals of the Tokyo Olympics. Oh, the terrible, terrible name she was called and the terrible negativity was thrown at her. It was awful. Now, she quit because she wanted to continue to fight another day. She knew it wasn't right. She wasn't in the right frame of mind or in the right
right body position to do this incredibly perilous job that she needs to do as an elite gymnast. Now she's a magnificent champion, just as Tiger Woods is. And I would maintain that these great champions understand when to quit and when to give up. And I take your point that those are,
that those are maybe kind of harsh sounding words because they're words that we have attached all of this negativity to. And it makes it very hard to change course. But suppose we sucked all that negativity away from those words. Suppose we thought of quitting as a positive.
That's true. And sports is a great example. I mean, I think sports examples are terrific. I think sports is one of the, some of the great metaphors for life. The example I often use is Scottie Pippen, who is persistently asked about his 1992 playoff game when he quit, when he wouldn't go back on the court after a timeout right at the end of the game, because he was mad to
The coach had decided to let another player take the final shot, and Scottie Pippen was mad. And so he sulked and he quit. He quit on his team. That has dogged him and followed him for lo these many years. As great a champion as he is, Michael Jordan's great, great teammate, he still carries that stigma of being a quitter.
I would argue, though, that it's up to each individual in their own heart and mind. Yes, we owe to our teammates, definitely. But sometimes we're better off not being in there if we're not going to be able to perform at a high level. In terms of the Scottie Pippen example, I'd say, you know, maybe he understood that he just really wasn't, you know, now because he was so upset.
And you can argue that maybe it wasn't the most mature thing to be that upset. But again, that's between him and his coaches and his... you know, his members of his team, not for me to judge. I just think that we're so quick to look at quitting as a negative and to not give people the option, the kind of elbow room, the psychological and spiritual elbow room to make another decision.
And we end up being really, really stuck.
Oh, no, no, no. They do all the time. You know, I just saw an interview the other day, Ryan Reynolds being interviewed by David Letterman on that Letterman show that's on Netflix now. And he interviews celebrities for not very long, but I find them very revelatory. And he says to Ryan Reynolds, well, when you came to Hollywood, I guess you didn't have a plan B, huh?
You knew you were going to make it. And Ryan Reynolds looks at him and laughs and says, didn't have a plan B. I had a plan B, C, D, E, F. I mean, he was quite ready to change if it hadn't worked out. Now, it didn't work out. But that's one of the points I try to make is that no one's saying it's going to work out.
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