Quasi-quitting may be the key to resetting and pivoting your career. Here’s how

Tiger Woods is a quitter.



Now, before you golf fans take a whack at me with a nine iron, let me explain: The man who has won 15 major tournaments and defined excellence in a fabulously difficult sport, the man whose mantra has been “Never give up,” the consummate winner, the great champion who has battled through physical and emotional distress, was never more of a champion, and never a greater competitor, than in the 2021 Masters Tournament.



He didn’t triumph. He didn’t come close to winning. In fact, he came in 47th.



Yet, for the first time, many Woods watchers noted, he seemed satisfied with not finishing first. Because he finished—period. And after suffering devastating injuries in a car accident on February 23, 2021, getting to the end of the tournament was itself a major achievement. A journalist asked, “Was this the equivalent of a victory to you, just showing up and being able to compete like you did?”



Woods’s reply: “Yes.”



He didn’t quit the tournament. But he did quit the perfectionism that had haunted him in the past, a mindset that made anything short of absolute victory indistinguishable from crushing defeat. He stopped thinking about his work in a single, narrow way.



Like other people we’ll meet in short order—some of them well-known historical figures—Woods didn’t change everything about his life and his work, turning his back on all that had gone before, in a quick, definitive act. He didn’t suddenly abandon the sport that has showered him with wealth and fame, or give the cold shoulder to the career that has brought his fans such pleasure as they watched him excel, time and time again. He didn’t suddenly ratchet back his famously high standards for athletic performance. He wanted to win—just as fiercely as he’s wanted to win for all the years he has played.



But still, he quit. He quit one way of competing—a way that required him to see only a top finish as acceptable—for another way, a way that takes the whole person and the present reality into account, a way that involves context and history.



What Woods pulled off that day was a quasi-quit. Think of it as precision quitting. It’s one of several creative strategies we’ll consider, a constructive way to turn that historically reviled activity—giving up—into an approach to life that just might bring you joy and satisfaction instead of frustration and shame.



This isn’t quiet quitting, the trend that emerged in the fall of 2022 and involved “doing the least amount of work, just this side of being fired.” Quasi-quitting isn’t about slacking off and trying to slide by, hoping that no one in charge notices. It’s about doing more, not less. Quasi-quitting is active, not passive. It’s powered by nimbleness and acumen, not apathy.



Woods made a realistic appraisal of his current circumstances and altered his methods to fit them. In his mind, he surely shifted a few elements here, shifted some others over there. Gauged the wind direction. Leaned one way, and then the other way, assessing this moment in time just as he might calculate the best approach to a difficult putt, seeing it from a dozen different angles before selecting his club and taking his shot. From this new perspective, he was the biggest winner of all.



Bryony Harris, a woman who changed her life at age 64, made a similar quasi-quit. A decade ago, after a varied career in Great Britain—she’s been, among other things, an architect and a photographer—she moved to Norway and became a psychotherapist. Her chronic quits and restarts weren’t really all that dramatic, she says, despite how they looked from the outside. They were matters of gradation and degree. “I have never made a decision such as ‘I’m going to stop doing that and do something else,’” she told a reporter in 2022. “It’s always been a gentle progression.”



What Woods knows, what Harris knows, is this: Quitting can be a rheostat dial, not just an on/off switch.



The quitting spectrum



Quitting doesn’t have to be a matter of extremes: yes or no, present or gone, now or never. It doesn’t necessarily mean blowing up everything, clearing the deck, making a clean sweep. It also can mean a slight but crucial recalibration of strategies. Such a change can be just as solid and consequential as a dead stop. It’s a way of taking what you already know and using it as you move forward, instead of starting from absolute zero.



That’s how Dave Allen has run his life. He’s always been able to parlay a passionate interest in one thing into a passionate interest in another. Quitting is a beginning for him, he says, not an end. Nothing he’s learned has ever been wasted.



“It’s tough being me,” he informs me with a rueful laugh. “Because I have to know everything about everything!”



Born and raised in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, Allen now lives in the Cincinnati area. And he recalls with relish that special moment at 15 when he first heard accordion music. A few lessons later, he was playing the accordion in a dance band and earning good money. He worked his way through college as a DJ at a local radio station. His romance with radio continued for more than a decade, but then gave way to his keen interest in computers.



“I took my love of computer programming and started my own custom software business,” he says. He sold his products—among them, programs to measure audiences and their preferences—to radio stations. Then his attention was caught by another business: real estate. He earned his real estate license so that he could buy homes to refurbish. “A lot of people see the pivots I’ve made and say, ‘What motivates you?’ I tell them, ‘Fear!’ ” He laughs. “I mean, what the hell am I gonna do?”



He means economic fear, yes. Paying bills and all the rest of it. But there’s something else he fears even more: Boredom. Rust. Getting stale. “I think that quality has kept me moving forward and reinventing myself.”



In 2009 he began taking flying lessons. “I quit three times. Hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I always went back.” He earned his pilot’s license two years ago.



His wife, Karen, is a culinary arts teacher at community centers. “Sometimes she’ll see me struggling with something and she’ll say, ‘Dave, give it up.’ But I’m not a quitter.” Except that he is—a quasi-quitter. And he makes the most of it.



In his 2021 New York Times story about Vinny Marciano, a top swimmer who made a surprising swerve in his life in 2017, David W. Chen comes up with a marvelous metaphor to describe a quasi-quit. Elite athletes often feel the immense pressure of always needing to be great, Chen notes: “But what if they harbored a secret desire to stop, and wanted to start anew—to hit Ctrl- Alt-Delete, essentially?”



Quitting, that is, doesn’t have to be a full stop. It can be a hesitation, a period of reflection, after which a new goal is pursued—maybe similar to the previous one, maybe not. A pause and a pivot.



Marciano had shattered records in the freestyle and backstroke as a high school swimmer in New Jersey, earning comparisons to Michael Phelps. His potential seemed limitless. But then, Chen writes, he just seemed to vanish.



He was still there. He just wasn’t in the pool. Burned-out on swimming, Marciano had become a climber. His passion for athletics was unabated; he had simply redirected it. His swimming career had started to feel more like a burden than a joy, he tells Chen: “I saw a never-ending ladder—no matter what I did, there was always going to be something I was expected to achieve.” Climbing provided the same physical release without the anxiety.



The power of quitting



Quitting is a vastly underutilized resource. It’s a strategy we may not recognize as a legitimate choice at all, but only as a compromise or a failure. It’s an untapped source of energy and inspiration that we shun out of a misguided sense that giving up—unless you’re talking about serial killing, substance abuse, or excess carbs—is inherently a bad thing. The lives of other animals—who quit constantly, as indeed they must in order to stay alive—are proof of the value of quitting, and the difference it can make.



But that doesn’t mean, of course, that quitting is always a good thing. No single course of action is right for everyone in all circumstances. Too often, though, quitting is rejected out of hand. And in the long run, our uncritical acceptance of the power of perseverance makes us more callous to the injustices of the world.



We can’t fix everything—but the things we can fix, we must.







Excerpted from Quitting: A Life Strategy (available April 18) by Julia Keller. Copyright © 2023 by Julia Keller. Reprinted with permission of Balance Publishing, an imprint of Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved.



Julia Keller is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, novelist, and playwright and was the chief book critic at The Chicago Tribune for many years before quitting the world of daily journalism to write books.