Successful People Know When To Quit

We've all heard the phrase "quitters never win."

It's fun to say if you're a youth baseball coach, but it doesn't hold up in real life.

Quitters win all the time.

The key is knowing when to quit.

Here are three examples of strategic quitting:

1) Too much cake

They offered Jerry Seinfeld $110 million dollars to make another season of Seinfeld. But he wouldn’t take the money.

When asked why he quit the show, here's what Seinfeld said:

"I could not go to that point where it starts to age and wither...it doesn't take long. For example, you go see a comedian and at an hour and ten minutes you love the guy, and at an hour and thirty, it's like, 'Eh. I though the was never going to finish.' And you walk out with a whole different feeling. It's a small amount of too much. Too much cake, too much anything — it changes the whole feeling."

Too much cake changes the whole feeling. So true.

2) Summer camp for entrepreneurs

Early on in my business, I attended an event called Camp GLP. It was a summer camp for entrepreneurs. Everyone loved it and I assume it was very profitable. But they shut it down after five years.

At the time, I didn't understand why. Do they hate money? But now that I've been in business for 10+ years, I finally get it.

It's easy to stick with an offering, or work with a certain client, for too long. When you find something that works, you want to get every last ounce out of it.

But everything has a natural ending. The only way to know for sure that you've stayed for too long is when it starts to go downhill. And then people don't remember it the same way.

3) Fatherly advice

My dad has a similar philosophy about high school and college reunions.

He says, “Leave the party while you’re still having fun.”

Basically, you want to leave before everyone is drunk and things get weird.

He’s told me this multiple times so I assume something incredibly traumatizing happened to him...

The problem is, you probably don’t want to leave when you’re having fun and things are going well.

Which brings us to an interesting conclusion:

Maybe the best time to quit is when you least feel like it.

When you're winning.

Something to think about this week.

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If you liked this idea, I wrote a related piece about why "never settle" is terrible advice.