1/15/2024 0 Comments Necessary endings podcast![]() ![]() In his book, however, Godin distinguishes between two situations: what he calls the dip and the cul-de-sac. In fact, some successes only come after you persevere, after you push through all the things that are not working. Of course, you don’t always need to quit things. Quitting is your first step before starting something new. If Oprah had never quit The Oprah Winfrey Show, there would be no OWN or any number of other projects she has since started. If Nirvana had never ended, there would be no Foo Fighters. If Bill Gates had never dropped out of college, there would be no Microsoft. Average is for losers.” The adage “quitters never win” is nice to print on a bumper sticker, but it’s just not true. Seth Godin wrote about this in The Dip in which he explains the world’s most successful people were quitters. I don’t want to be a flake, but sometimes the only way to succeed is to quit. ![]() When to quit and when to stickīut, you might be wondering, isn’t it bad to quit things? Shouldn’t we keep our commitments? Not necessarily. This is why we end things, or at least why we should: to open up new spaces for us to create a better way of being in the world. So, what better thing are you being called into in this season? Consider the possibility that before that next good thing can begin, you must let go of the current “good” in your life. But isn’t that what living is all about? Certainly, that’s what art is all about. It’s a scary place to be, on this threshold of transformation, standing in the gap between who you are and what you could be. The decision, even if it was forced on me, eventually led to something good.Īs I consider certain changes in my life and work, I try to remember that sometimes the better can only begin after the good has ended. I don’t regret quitting that job or ending that relationship, because something better always came along. I could have learned another lesson or two, could have grown a bit more, but as far as I can remember, I don’t have any regrets about walking away from anything. ![]() In my life, there have been many projects and people and even places I have quit that, in retrospect, could have continued a little longer. But there really is no other way to find out than to try. To quit “what’s working” in the hopes of achieving something else is a risk that could end in failure. In our world today, such unnecessary changes often seem foolish. This, I think, is an act of faith: to stop doing what other people may consider “good” or worthwhile and do something else, something that seems truer. When we let go of what was, we open up a space for what could be. Sometimes, the good has to end before the better can begin And what happens when the “good” ends is that something better often comes along. Every good thing, at some point, has to end. When I said this from stage at the final Tribe Conference, I was thinking about a lot of things: book projects and friendships and even places I’ve lived. He writes, “Before the good can begin, the bad has to end.” But I want to take that one step further: Sometimes, the good has to end before the better can begin. You spend your life ending things until eventually even you expire. In the book Necessary Endings, Henry Cloud says that endings are neither good nor bad they're necessary. But something I’m learning to trust more these days is my intuition, that still small voice that speaks up when I’m headed in the right direction (or the wrong one). Oftentimes, I hang on to hope for too long, thinking that job or relationship or opportunity is somehow going to change. In fact, I’m rather terrible at ending things. In this article, however, I want to share the process of ending things well: how you know it’s time to end a season and how to do it. I’ve even learned that letting go of my need to succeed is the only true way to feel fulfilled. I’ve talked at length on my experience of realizing that getting everything I wanted didn’t make me happy. I've already shared why quitting things (including projects that are “working”) can be a necessary part of the creative process. The past two years have been a season of personal and professional awakening for me in which I have realized what matters most to me, what I truly want, and what no longer works. It was in reference to this being the last year of a conference I’ve run for the past five years, but it meant a lot more than that. It just came out: “Sometimes, the good has to end before the better can begin.” I didn’t rehearse it, didn’t have it in my notes. Recently while speaking, I heard myself say something I didn’t plan on sharing. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |