Growth Through Subtraction
A decade or so ago, I quit a handful of things cold-turkey. Some of them are silly. Some of them were a bit more contentious.
For instance, I quit going to malls, retail outlets, and department stores during the stretch of time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Like Cindy-Lou-Who, I felt the consumerist-obsession sapped the meaning out of the season. I didn’t enjoy searching for parking spots, or fighting traffic, or shoulder-checking shoppers just trying to walk through an aisle.
So I decided to opt out. It was a small boycott, but it improved my quality of life instantly. I didn’t boycott Christmas (like a Grinch). I made a small change to eliminate an aspect of life I hated. I took back my agency.
Around the same time, I also made a more drastic change. There was an extended family member who always found a way to be particularly nasty to me at holiday gatherings — it began as a teen and continued into my early 20s.
I’d reached a boiling point and I’d run out of civil measures for addressing the issue. I had two options: physical retaliation or physical relocation. So I chose the latter and I made a deliberate choice to stop associating with that individual altogether.
I could have put up with it for the rest of my life. Instead, I decided to address it. Rather than be a victim to my circumstances, I decided to reclaim my agency.
At the time I implemented both of those changes, I thought of them as small experiments. “What if I just eliminated the stuff that’s sucking the life out of me?”
So I tried it. And guess what? My life improved.
Then I tried it with other things, too.
I quit a job I hated. Found a new one. When I started to hate that, I quit it, too.
I ended an unproductive relationship. I ended a few friendships. I stopped defending myself to others who questioned my life, education, and career choices. Some friendships eliminated themselves.
I burned my law and business school plans only weeks before I was supposed to start. I stopped pretending I wanted to be who or what I felt others expected me to be.
I moved away from a city I no longer felt the same excitement about. I relocated to a beautiful city where I felt inspired every day by the natural beauty.
I stopped spending money on stuff I didn’t care about — like clothes. I stopped beating myself up about spending money on stuff I did care about — like books.
The more things I quit, the more things I wanted to quit. I became addicted to quitting stuff. But not just for the sake of it. I was quitting things that no longer served me, things that sucked the life from me.
I lovingly refer to this era of my life as my “Don’t Do Stuff You Hate” era — I even co-authored a book about it.
With each thing I quit, I reclaimed a small amount of agency over my time, my attention, my energy, my money…my life. As quitting gained momentum, my life transformed.
Over a period of a few short years, I radically subtracted the stuff that sucked life out of me. Sometimes I replaced the thing I quit with something that energized me (one effective habit for quitting anything is replacing it with something else). Other times, I didn’t replace it — and just enjoyed the regained peace of mind.
In a sense, this habitual quitting felt a lot like sculpting. I was chiseling away at a marble slab — my life — removing the blemishes, attempting to reveal what laid beneath.
The process forced me to face a misconception head-on. I grew up believing success was about acquiring what I didn’t have. Call it The Void-Filling Fallacy.
But the process taught me the opposite. Often it’s not what you lack that’s the problem. Often the real obstacle is what you are already doing. The stuff you’re doing that you’re allowing to hold you back from a life that would bring you more fulfillment.
In this sense, I learned that disempowerment is all too often a function of “Agency Leaks” rather than any individual circumstance. The small, cumulative leaks of time, energy, attention, money, and emotion that I allowed to be sucked out of my life by a litany of false obligations, fake relationships, or material possessions. Eliminating the leaks allowed me to recapture my personal agency.
Growth happened not as a function solely of adding stuff to my life, but as a result of subtracting stuff.
This probably seems a bit corny. But becoming a quitter changed my life.
It started with a few small things. Those snowballed into bigger life changes. Recapturing agency over my time, attention, energy, emotions, and resources liberated me to chase after the stuff I wanted — and needed– to chase after.
Quitting was like eliminating an anchor. Without it, momentum was much easier to come by.
When’s the last time you quit something that was sucking the life out of you?
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Mitchell Earl is the Chief Operating Officer at Praxis, a career mentorship program that’s helped thousands of entrepreneurial young adults start successful careers without college. He writes regularly about how young adults can take agency over their lives, careers, and money. His work has been read by millions across the globe. He is the host of The Career Bound Podcast, and author of Don’t Do Stuff You Hate.
