Over the past few years, I’ve had countless conversations with journalist friends and coworkers about our potential longevity in the field. As we watch the traditional news industry seemingly implode, with countless rounds of layoffs, outlet closures, and declining cultural relevancy, we’re all grieving the death of our dream jobs, even as we more or less continue working in the field. (Or, you know, try to work in it.)
Even without those external forces hammering our industry, most of my friends are now in their 30s, at what feels like a natural point to wonder if it isn’t time to try something a little less stressful and, perhaps, a little better paying. I hear a similar sentiment from acquaintances in other creative or vocational fields.
“Vocational crisis is very of the moment,” writes the journalist Ann Friedman. “If you know anyone who pays their bills by conducting research, teaching, community organizing, making art, fostering diversity, or providing care to an underserved population, you know this already. It usually afflicts people who are somewhat established, though still financially precarious and already burned out, with many working years left ahead of them.”
Whether you’re a journalist, actor, or teacher—anyone whose profession is inherent to their identity—how do you know when it’s time to go? At the same time, how do you give up on something you can’t imagine your life, your being, without?
It’s a tricky topic to write about because quitting is mired in negative connotations. No one wants to be viewed as a quitter, and popular culture loves the stories of people perceived to be fighters, the scrappy upstarts who never give up. I certainly don’t want to be responsible for telling anyone not to pursue their dreams, and I don’t plan on pivoting from mine just yet, despite the many reasons I should.
But the difficult truth is that staying laser focused on one goal or way of being can mean neglecting other opportunities. Rather than thinking about quitting as an ending to your one and only dream, it can be helpful to reframe it as providing an opening to untold possibilities.
Moving past the discomfort
At 9 years old, Maya Shankar was such a prodigious talent she was accepted into a precollege violin program at the Juilliard School, the prestigious performing arts conservatory in New York. Shankar staked her identity on music, studying under virtuoso Itzhak Perlman and spending untold hours practicing.
But her dream of being a professional violinist ended abruptly at 15, when she tore a tendon while playing the notoriously difficult Paganini Caprices. A subsequent juvenile rheumatoid arthritis diagnosis solidified that she’d have to give up the violin for good.
These days, Shankar isn’t known as a violin prodigy. But her story is no tragedy. She’s a cognitive neuroscientist, the wunderkind who founded and chaired the White House’s first Social and Behavioral Sciences Team under the Obama administration before advising the United Nations and Google. She hosts a podcast about how to deal with life’s many changes.
Shankar’s story is certainly exceptional. Few people can claim to be a musical prodigy…or Rhodes Scholar…or 20-something White House director, never mind all three. But it resonated deeply as I’ve considered when you can tell it’s time to give up on a dream and move on to something else.
While Shankar’s hand was forced because of her injury, quitting violin allowed her to discover new interests and talents. It underlines the reality that very few people do one thing successfully forever. Most will change professions or move on from childhood goals. Sometimes your new venture will be bigger and better, other times, it won’t.
There are countless reasons to quit. Depending on your vocation, you may find the money just doesn’t work when the cost of living is constantly increasing. Others may find the realities of working within imperfect systems mean they will never be able to accomplish what they’d like. Still others may realize they simply don’t have it, whatever it is. Or, like Shankar, their decision may be made for them, through injury or layoffs or some other external force. Just because you dream of something doesn’t always mean you can do it. All of that is okay, part of life.
But for many, the first hints of doubt or indication that you might not be cut out for your aspirations result in a doubling down on your dream, known as escalation of commitment, writes Annie Duke in Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. This psychological phenomenon occurs when individuals or organizations continue to commit resources to a failing course of action, especially those made public. (See: anything done by any politician ever.) Rather than miraculously getting you to the outcome you always wanted, though, this doubling down when all of the evidence is telling you to change course usually compounds your losses. (See also: The sunk-cost fallacy.)
Duke is a former professional poker player who argues that one of the keys to excelling at the game is knowing when to fold your hand, before the stakes are too high. In fact, the best players fold far more hands than they play. Experienced players know that one jackpot isn’t the end all be all, while novices bet too frequently that they can win, even when they’ve been dealt what they know to be crappy cards.
“The particular hand they’re playing is not the last hand they’ll ever play, [and that] particular day that they’re playing is not the last day they’ll ever play,” Duke writes of the experienced players’ mentality. “A poker player will play thousands upon thousands of hands over their lifetime, so in the grand scheme of things whether or not they lose one single hand of poker matters very little.”
Similarly, you will likely have many dreams throughout your life. Getting hung up on one that isn’t working on could delay discovering what the next, potentially better one is.
Throughout her book, Duke posits that many people stick with things for far too long, often to disastrous, or at least unfortunate, results. Quitting at the right time will feel like you quit too early, she writes, because you haven’t given the time for losses to actually accumulate. That’s a good thing, but since you’ll never know what you lost, you may think only of what you didn’t gain.
When I think of leaving corporate media, for example, I often focus on the loss of authority or resources that come with working for a large, established outlet, how people will take me less seriously if I don’t have a Big Name backing my work. I don’t think about how after a decade-plus I wasn’t exactly a household name or being given any of those resources to do big investigations, anyway. Was that likely to change? Yet opting to move on means I’ll always wonder what if.
In Shankar’s case, sticking with the violin could have meant proving her doctors wrong and becoming a virtuoso on par with her mentor Perlman. Or it could have meant many years enduring pain for a career that never panned out, and missing out on what her life became. She’ll never know, because she decided to cut her losses and try something new.
While popular culture is filled with those inspiring stories about people who kept going at all costs, there are far more real life instances of people who gave up at one thing to find success in something else. But quitting at the appropriate time isn’t exactly headline-grabbing.
“We are reluctant to walk away when we should because we have the feeling that doing so will slow our progress or stop it all together. But it is the reverse that is actually true,” writes Duke. “If you stick to a path that is no longer worth pursuing…that is when you lose ground. Any time you stay mired in a losing endeavor, that is when you are slowing your progress.”
Stepping stones
There’s a lot more that can be said about how individuals tie their identities to work, particularly in the U.S., and how that makes quitting even more difficult (indeed, Duke wrote a whole book about it). But I want to get into some of the actionable advice I received over the course of writing this essay that I think will be useful for those considering a change.
A few years ago, I wrote a series of stories on ambition and work. During the reporting, I spoke with the psychotherapist Satya Doyle Byock, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, and she asked me a question I still think about (paraphrased below).
“Imagine it’s a year from now and you’re at the same job doing the same work every day. How would you feel?”
This question helped put into perspective the work that I was doing day-to-day and the reasonable potential that work would have for my advancement. It inspired me to make a few changes that did improve my outlook, though in retrospect I wish I had been bolder and made even bigger ones.
That probably should have included looking for a new job altogether. Because as Catherine Fisher, a career expert and vice president of communications at LinkedIn, told me, when you’re considering whether to quit or stay the course, consider what gives you energy and what zaps your energy. While understanding that drudgery is part of every job, ideally you are feeling energized by the majority of your tasks or output. If you find that most of the time your energy is drained, that you are dreading work every single day, that is a good time to figure out Plan B.
“When people think of the dream job, they think, ‘I’m going to be happy every day.’ And I guarantee you that even if you’re a well-paid actor, you’ve got really terrible days,” says Fisher. But if “the majority of your time you’re inspired by the work, then you’re in a good place.”
It can also help to think about your career (and life) in different stages. Your current role might not be your ideal, but it could be an important stepping stone in your career by teaching you necessary skills or connecting you with the right people. Knowing that what you are doing now is temporary can give you the energy you need to get through it and on to better things.
“Not everything is time bound. You’re not going to be in this for the rest of your life,” says Fisher. “Your career is a collection of jobs and skills.”
In corporate settings, Fisher says you might think a manager or boss is spending time mapping out your career path for you. But that just isn’t the case. Instead, it’s up to you to think through what you want and how you might get there.
“You and only you are responsible for your career path,” says Fisher. “You have to figure it out. And then you have to ask for it.”
That’s life
A big part of my conversation with Fisher revolved around AI and how it’s contributing to the vocational crisis that Friedman identified. You can see the effects in the upended entry-level job market and the near-total pause on corporate hiring we’re currently experiencing. Sure, not all of that can be blamed on AI, but it’s obvious that external economic forces are making it difficult for people to find any job right now, never mind a dream role.
I don’t have an answer for you on how to think about the AI of it all. But what all of this underscores is how important flexibility is in our careers as in life.
“Just because you’ve thought you wanted to do something doesn’t mean that you’re stuck with that for the rest of your life,” says Fisher.
That doesn’t mean you give up completely on your dream tomorrow. But if you’re unhappy for whatever reason in what you’re currently pursuing, and you have been for a while, it’s worth considering what else is out there. That could be a completely new job, new industry, or simply a new company.
Think about what parts of your job are non-negotiable, Fisher advises. At the same time, be open to learning about new skills, roles, and opportunities that could spark a new dream, a la Shankar. This makes any eventual transition—whether by choice or forced by things outside of your control—easier to handle.
“We shouldn’t wait to be forced to find a Plan B, we should always be doing some exploration,” writes Duke. “Especially because sometimes Plan B can turn out to be better than the thing you’re already pursuing.”
This story was originally published on Money Moves.
