When to Quit

And when to stick it out

When do you give up?

I’ve been trying to answer that question for myself for the past few years.

Accountability can be scary, and it’s hard to know when to create accountability (by setting goals) or to let yourself focus elsewhere.

I’ve hated setting goals for a while. I’ve found them to be restrictive, unchanging, and reflect a mindset of stability in identity that you shouldn’t have.

For those who love to explore like me, we know that we eventually have to ship a product. We have to finish what we start. In this piece, I’ll be investigating the relationship between identity and goals, and I’ll give you some of the best wisdom I’ve found on how to set the right goals.

Value proposition: You’ll learn to create goals that you stick with and understand the real reason you don’t finish what you set out to achieve.

Lessons on Identity

You should always be changing.

As you learn about the world and yourself, you change. You find that an old method isn’t reliable. You discover a new mindset that you want to adopt. You meet someone who changes your trajectory.

As you learn more about reality, you change as a person (and you should change). Your self should be an ever-evolving entity that responds to the environment. If you don’t adapt, you’ll fall to the wayside. Ray Dalio explains this dynamic in his Principles:

The world is littered with once-great things that deteriorated and failed; only a rare few have kept reinventing themselves to go on to new heights of greatness. All machines eventually break down, decompose, and have their parts recycled to create new machines. That includes us.

If you aren’t reinventing yourself, if you aren’t adapting in response to discovery, you’ll fail. And this is the problem that I’ve always had with goals. You should change — a stable identity is either the sign of ignorance or enlightenment (and it’s probably the former). Goals don’t change. When you set a goal a year or even a few months down the line, you are taking a bet for what your future self would want based on what you currently want.

I stumbled across a writer, whose work I love but who doesn’t post anymore, who argued a similar point about abandoning side projects. In short, he doesn’t think we should finish a project for the sake of finishing it:

You should never feel bad about not finishing something. A side project is like a book. You should not force yourself to complete a book. If you don’t finish a book, it is not your fault. It’s the author’s fault. Similarly, an abandoned side project is not your problem. It’s the idea that doesn’t deserve your time and effort anymore.

As you learn more about the world, your old ideas for what’s worthwhile fall apart. Your new ideas nullify your old intentions. While you may have thought your goal was a great idea three months ago, it doesn’t quite make sense, today. So you stop working on it, and you move on.

Well, that’s exactly what happened to this writer — he viewed writing a newsletter as no longer being a productive use of his time, and he moved on. And to be honest, I’m sad. I love this guy’s stuff, but he let go out his identity as a writer. Maybe he shouldn’t have.

Identity Drives Everything

Identity is built from your habits. What you do each and every day decides who you are. And it’s these habits that yield results. James Clear put it best in Atomic Habits:

You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.

While you may have lofty intentions, nothing gets done without daily action to back those intentions up. Identity shapes every action we take. We do things because we’re the type of person to do those things.

Identity is the driving force of results.

Lessons in Accountability

Here’s the thing about accountability: it doesn’t care about who you are, what you like to do, or what you want to do. Accountability demands that something be shipped.

I’m bad at being accountable.

When I say “I’m bad,” it doesn’t mean that I am worse than the average person. In fact, I would bet that I’m better than the average person at accountability. What I mean is that there’s a wide gap between how accountable I think should be and how accountable I actually am.

The conventional wisdom is that the reason people don’t achieve their goals is because they don’t work hard enough for them. I am not trying to refute that wisdom. It’s generally true that not achieving a goal is the result of a lack of hard work (it can also be a lack of resources, but it seems most people are able to account for this when they set their goals — the assumption that falls apart is that they’ll work hard to achieve those goals).

This doesn’t mean you’re lazy though. Most people fail not because they don’t have the ability to work hard to achieve their goals. They fail because they set new goals. Their identity has changed since the first time they set a goal, and so they choose a new goal.

Thus, we return to the unresolvable problem: goals are inspired by identities. Identities are forever changing, but goals aren’t.

So, what do you do? Do you set goals? Do you not set them? At the heart of these questions is the following problem: when do you stick with it and when do you move on?

It starts in the beginning. It starts with the goal itself — not its execution.

Become clear with your values and only choose goals that align with them.

If a goal is not aligned with your values, you shouldn’t be doing it.

While our identity is everchanging, there are some key parts of it that are stable. For example, I’ve had the same purpose for over a year now: create tools that help individuals flourish.

Good goals are commended by others. Great goals arise from our core. We don’t care what other people say about them.

Many of our goals aren’t really ours. In high school, I wanted to be a doctor. Yes, I wanted to help people be healthy, but I also loved the idea of the prestige that went with it. I don’t want to be a doctor anymore — it was a status goal, which are often destined to fail. When setting a goal, ask yourself the following question: if I received no money, status, or external good for completing this goal, would I still do it?

I speak from a place of immense privilege with this question. If money, status, or other external goods are some of your fundamental values, do not ask yourself this question! For me, money, status, etc. are distractions from what I really want. The point of this question is to eliminate common distractions in favor of aligning yourself with your fundamental values.

Once you choose the right goal, you’ll stick with it. It no longer becomes a question of your evolving identity and now becomes a question of whether or not you can put in the work.