To Quit or Not to Quit

“Please let me know when you have it done. As soon as possible…”

“Ok. I’ll let you know.”

With that, I turned towards my mentor’s office and walked through the doorway. He shut the door. I took a few moments to compose myself even though I was shaking with frustration.

It didn’t work.

I broke down right then and there in his office.

I was into my third year pursuing my Ph.D. in computer engineering, and I was on the edge of a cliff.

I wanted to quit right then and there…

I thought I knew what it was like to be in the depths of a struggle, the “valley of death”, the “trough” of the process, the “dip”. That was the first time in my life that I truly understood it and experienced it for what it was.

It was also the first time I made it through that process. Now here I am, fifteen years later, with a solid career in engineering and a lot more experience with that struggle. It ranks somewhere in the middle in terms of the challenges of life.

Here are five things that hit me hardest in “The Dip” by Seth Godin.

1. You absolutely need to pursue mastery

Dan Koe has plenty of great arguments for being multi-dimensional in your skills, interests, and pursuits, but in order to truly command the attention of others, Seth makes a strong argument that you must be the best in class of something, anything, to provide a compelling argument for attention.

Why would someone use your services if there’s a better alternative just a few clicks away? The power of the internet is that services can be offered to the entire world, options are endless, and everyone has a chance to prove themselves.

But that’s also the biggest problem now. If you can’t compete on quality, then you must compete on price. From there, it’s a race to the bottom.

To that end, you’ve got two options: quit or be number one.

Mastery in a niche of one or “one of zero” as Alex Hormozi puts it, is essential. The easiest way to get there is to put in the hard work in a very specific vein of one category. Don’t compete unless you absolutely must, and even then, make sure it’s in something where you can create a moat that is dependent on time, effort, and skill.

If you can do that, it’s a simple matter of outpacing everyone else. Just ask Mr. Beast or Stephen King or Taylor Swift.

That’s what the next point is about.

2. Just this one thing puts you in the top tier

I feel like I’m preaching to the choir here.

If you’ve been around the block in content creation and growing an audience and building your digital footprint, then you’ve heard some variant of this next point.

• Do the work.

• Do it every single day.

• Do it consistently over a long period of time.

Execute despite your emotional state. Show up even though nobody is sitting in the audience. The stage is there regardless.

If your work ethic and commitment are at the point of obsession, then you bet your butt that you will outpace even the most naturally gifted of individuals in a craft. I’m not talking about sports or anything that requires physical requirements. I’m talking about mental skills, communication skills, and everything in between.

It’s not just spinning your wheels. It’s iteration on the foundational skills. You must be willing to face the obstacles and work through them, and knowing the path from beginner to expert and the suckage in between goes a long way. You know the dip is coming, and you know it’s going to be hard.

So let’s talk about that in the third point.

3. Every path has this in common

The dip is the reason that most don’t achieve success in their pursuits. The middle section between the rush of the new and the exhilaration of the end has buckets of blood, sweat, and tears.

When I first started graduate school, I was high off of completing two majors and a minor for my undergraduate career. I had finished my freshman year fifth from the bottom of the engineering class and spent the rest of it repairing my GPA. The shock of going from an artistically rigorous program to an academically brutal one was overwhelming.

Over the next three years, I watched as our cohort fell away due to a combination of the big three:

• sheer burnout

• love and marriage

• industry opportunities

In my case, I nearly quit due to the first one. The post-doc on our team treated me like his workhorse, and pushed me for data and results so aggressively that it made my head spin. I would work until 4 AM for days at a time, and I was ground down to tears.

But I did it.

My advisor called quitting a “strategic withdrawal”, but I realized in his office that the pain of the moment would never be worse than the pain of knowing that I couldn’t handle the dip of this process. I wasn’t raised to quit in the middle of anything. If I was to fail, I would go down fighting tooth and nail.

The pain, the wall, the boulder in the path…those obstacles are for others, but you need to sacrifice (the next point in this list).

4. You must quit many times to reach your destination

Along the path to mastery, there are going to be detours and off-ramps. The learning curve is tough to navigate as you tackle the more advanced concepts and skills. Sometimes you’ll have to loop back if your fundamentals aren’t strong enough or you missed a key concept to the point where you come to a dead end.

Seth refers to these as “cul-de-sacs”, and it takes experience to know if you are in one.

Every discipline has these. You work in a dead-end job or you see the glass ceiling. You get distracted and stubbornly try to solve a problem on your own when the internet and AI are readily available for a nudge. You avoid taking risks out of fear and uncertainty when those are the exact ones that will help you break through.

Along the main path, you must quit the things that are holding you back. The overused platitude “disappear for x months and become unrecognizable” is one extreme way of putting it, but it doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, it’s not practical or pragmatic to do that at most stages of life.

Pain from the navigation is part of the journey. It’s something you come to anticipate. There’s just no way around it because there are no shortcuts to true success. Quitting enough things along the way to keep you going is the hardest thing because everything is competing for your attention.

Which leads me to my final point.

5. You must sustain the emotional content that started with you.

Seth is marketing master, and one of the things that I’ve had a hard time understanding as an engineer (but get as an artist) is pitch.

The academic world runs on facts. You think all those devices you surround yourself with every single day have opinions about whether or not they work for you? I know it may feel like it at times, but technology functions on physical principles that don’t just change on a whim.

People aren’t like that at all, though.

In order to make a sale, you need to offer fulfillment of a wish, an outcome, a dream. People don’t buy smartphones because they’re 5G, they buy them because they want to stream their favorite Netflix series at high resolution with amazing sound quality on the subway to work.

It’s the same for learning and mastering skills. You don’t start learning to knit because you have an obsession with needles (I hope). You want to get better at it so that you can have clothing that fits you perfectly.

When it comes to pushing through the dip when it finally arrives and proceeds to pull you through like dough through a pasta maker, it’s going to suck balls. During that time, you need to continue selling yourself on the reason you started and the outcome you want. You owe it to yourself. If you quit during the dip, then it’s wasted effort, investment, and emotional torture.

When I nearly broke in my Ph.D. program, I reminded myself of why I was pursuing it. I wanted to do something that nobody else on the planet had done, and I wanted to be among my relatives who also completed their degrees as well.

I later found out that I was the first one in the family who pulled it off as my dad had mislead me into believing he had one. Turns out, we are a family of bankers and government servants.

The verdict

I’ve written a lot in this issue, but it’s because I really enjoyed this book. It’s actually a quick read at only 83 pages, and the pacing of it is brisk with lots of low-hanging branches of truth to smack you in the face along the way.

You’ll see quitting not as a mark of failure, but more of an art.

“The Dip” is a manual about knowing when, how, and why to quit the things you think you want to do. It goes nicely with this newsletter because I’m all about creating a digital heirloom and knowing yourself and your identity are the foundations.

• Quit before you start to save yourself from wasting effort.

• Quit when you’ve achieved what you set out to do.

• Quit because it’s time to move to the next level.

This book is worth reading when things get tough, and you’re right in the middle of the dip.

Take it from me, Vince Mao, Ph.D.