Celebrating Quitters Day

Happy Quitters Day! Today is January 17, the day most Americans will quit their resolutions — and I’m really excited about it. Not because I hate quitting (I don’t), but because I hate resolutions. Let me introduce you to somebody in my life who is anything but a quitter — to tell you why.

That person is my husband, Benjy. Back in January 2020, it felt like my heart was exploding when I watched him give a guest lecture at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. For a kid who grew up just a few miles away from Anderson with a coding and sequencing learning disability, it was extraordinary to watch him address a group of Masters in Business Analytics students at this top-20 business school.

Playing it cool, I sat in the back row with a poker face and a notebook (taking notes he’d later ask me for, as I predicted — even though he had told me he absolutely wasn’t going to ask). When the room clapped at the end of his lecture and the line formed around him, I teared up a little: It was just amazing to watch knowing what he had overcome.

Who would think that a kid who couldn’t even write a single sentence in the third grade could grow up to write in English, Hebrew and Arabic? Let alone code in three computer languages?

This isn’t a fairy tale story about his resilience in overcoming his obstacles. It’s more about the fact that his story doesn’t have a fairy tale ending. Yes, his accomplishments are remarkable, but the effects of his learning disability linger: He is still a horrible speller and long-form proofreader, even when using spell-check. He will tell you himself that he can build you an analytics dashboard, but he is incapable of spelling the word “broccoli” correctly.

In fact, according to Benjy, part of the reason he has excelled at coding is because, unlike checking for spelling in a long-form document, when you get something wrong while coding, you literally can’t miss it because “the whole product is just broken.”

At his old jobs at places like large consulting and tech firms or government agencies, attention to detail mattered, but his proof-reading abilities never mattered too much. Teams were big, so there were always lots of eyes on everything. One of the things that attracted him to starting as the first hire at a start-up this past February was how small and senior the team would be. So when his boss asked him to proofread a slide deck they had all been working on and Benjy gave the thumbs up, his boss was reasonably miffed that there were a few errors he had missed.

Nobody likes to mess up at work, especially when you’re still relatively new. In fact, if you’re like any of the high-potential and high-performing people I work with, a mistake can easily be confused for failure, and failure can quickly feel existential.

a mistake can easily be confused for failure, and failure can quickly feel existential.

Odds are that, like Benjy, you are good at 99% of the things you do at work. The truth is that we’re all bad at something in our job. That exact something that you might be tempted to make your New Year’s resolution, and that same something you are probably quitting by today. This is the year, you swore, you’d be more organized or manage your time better.

So, as you quit your resolution, take a page from Benjy’s book. Instead of convincing himself and others that he’d fix that bad habit of missing typos, he simply owned it: “I just explained to him that this is something I’m terrible at because of my coding and sequencing issues, so I should still play a role in building the deck and presenting it to the clients, but I should never be the final set of eyeballs on it.”

His boss’s answer? “No problem.”

That moment of open communication saved Benjy from a series of future bad slide decks and tough conversations. Instead of spending all his energy on remediation, Benjy had pivoted and focused on optimization.

For all the talk about “vulnerability” at work and the millions upon millions of Brené Brown books sold, it’s still really hard to talk about our weaknesses at work. Earlier in our careers, we worry that any admission of weakness might derail the next promotion. Later, in positions of leadership, we worry about how our team will perceive our flaws.

While the rush to remediation can be tempting, it can actually distract us from optimizing our overall performance. To put it like leadership expert Marcus Buckingham, “We live in a remedial world [and] you don’t remediate your way to excellence.” As Buckingham explained in an interview with Adam Grant, “In fact, if you’re not really careful, you get people’s minds thinking much more about failure prevention than about soaring.” As though he had heard Benjy’s very story, Buckingham continued, “no one has ever excelled because they stopped making grammatical errors in their writing.”

So as you quit your resolution, quit the temptation to focus your energy on remediation and focus on doubling down on your strengths. As we celebrate quitters day, let’s celebrate what makes you soar.

Randi Braun is an executive coach, consultant, speaker and the founder of Something Major.