The Comfort of Moving On (When to Quit)

A few years ago, I heard former professional gambler and author Annie Duke on the marvelous podcast, “People I (Mostly) Admire,” hosted by economist Steve Levitt of the Freakonomics franchise. In Duke’s book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, she discusses the art of quitting, and how many of us wait too long to walk away. After all, if there’s one thing a good gambler knows how to do, it’s “when to fold ‘em,” as the song goes. It’s important not to stick with a poker hand when the odds are telling you to quit.

Similarly, it’s important in life not to stick with a job, a pursuit, or a partner when every fiber of your being is telling you to get out. Steve Levitt summarizes Annie Duke’s book this way: “People stick with bad things almost always for too long, and we’d be better off if we quit things sooner.” Waiting too long causes us to stop progressing, to stop gaining ground toward our goals.

How often have you waited to quit an unfulfilling job out of fear and uncertainty, only to find that after doing so, you wound up telling yourself, “I should have done this years ago”?

Getting yourself to quit on time can be tricky. There’s an emotional pull in our society that makes quitting sound weak. We hear accolades for people’s “stick-to-itiveness.” We hear aphorisms like “quitters never win, winners never quit.” But what we might not hear is that a successful person who you admire might have quit three other goals before finding the one that worked, that an entrepreneur had two failed businesses before finding the one that succeeded, that a person left three romantic relationships before finding the one that clicked.

In order to grow, we have to allow ourselves to quit aspects of our lives that aren’t working.

Over the last year, I quit my two main music activities: I stopped playing at a church where I’d worked almost every Sunday for twelve years, and then last week I played my last concert with a local yacht rock band that I’d performed with for three years. In both cases I was playing with good musicians who were nice people. There was nothing awful happening in either scenario. Both allowed me to do what I do fairly well: play the keyboards. Both paid me a little cash that gave me a sense of contributing to my family (albeit, minimally). There were reasons to stay.

But neither musical act was fulfilling. I wasn’t inspired. I wasn’t stretching myself as a player. I was showing up, playing, collecting a check, and going home. That’s not what I want out of music. I think of drummer Bill Bruford quitting Yes, Gregg Rollie leaving Journey, or Sting pulling out of The Police, each at a point when those bands were at their creative peaks. There were all sorts of reasons to stay, but they each decided it was time to walk away.

Now, leaving a church gig and local yacht rock band pales in comparison to the above examples, but despite a multitude of reasons to stay, I quit both of them, and if I’m honest with myself, later than I should have. You know you’ve made the right decision when after quitting you feel a little lighter, a little freer, and that’s how I feel now.

Now it’s up to me to put that new energy into action, and to proudly carry the mantel and say, “Yeah, I’m a quitter.”

Sports Hats Invite Conversation

Spontaneous conversations seem to be a lost art. It’s so easy to avoid eye contact and conversation by peering at the latest headlines on your phone, that chance encounters are less likely than they were a few decades ago. Unfortunately, this lack of small talk can feed on itself until people lose the skill altogether. Each morning, I pass by dog-walkers who not only don’t shoot the breeze with me – a fellow dog-walker – but can’t even garner the energy to say hello, as if they’ve lost the ability to utter the two-word syllable. More likely, they’ve lost all confidence to interact with strangers. Or maybe they’re just douchebags. Hard to tell.

One way to occasionally overcome this trend while traveling is by wearing a sport hat. On a recent trip to the Los Angeles area, I had two delightful conversations with complete strangers, all because of the hat I was wearing. Usually, it’s the Green Bay Packers hat that attracts the most attention, but on this trip I donned the cap of my first-place Milwaukee Brewers. Neither of my conversations came from Brewers fans, but the recognition was enough to start them chatting.

My wife, daughter and I were hanging out at a wine bar in Santa Barbara (it sounds kind of bougie, I know), and one of the guys at a table next to us notice my hat: “That is the greatest sports logo ever, the Milwaukee Brewers.” He proceeded to point out to his colleague that the Brewers emblem is no ordinary baseball glove, but a glove comprised of the letters M and B for the name of the sports team. It is a great sports logo! But it was cool for someone else to notice. For the next few minutes, we talked about my Brewers and his Dodgers, and how the playoffs have watered down the importance of the regular season, etc. Good stuff!

A day later my daughter and I were on the shuttle bus taking us from the Sara Bareilles concert at the Hollywood Bowl back to the Zoo. There were only two seats left, separated by five or six rows, so we each took one, but soon after another group of people came onto the bus for standing room only. I gave up my seat for the first woman who walked on (who said chivalry is dead?) and after saying thank you, she noticed my hat and said, “I was born in St. Louis. Don’t hate me.”  Well, it’s true that the Cardinals have been a thorn in the Brewers’ side since the 1982 World Series, and after she introduced herself as “Ann from Ann Arbor” (she having attended the University of Michigan), we chatted for a bit about baseball before moving on to other things. Ann was a talker, and while it’s true that I wouldn’t have wanted to spend an entire day with her, for a 20-minute bus ride she was a pure delight. She told me about her job in video work, her apartment near USC, her Christmas caroling adventures, and about writing a musical and playing the French horn. When we got off the bus she wanted to meet my daughter and ended up giving both of us a hug.

Yeah, I know. For a lot of people these types of stories only solidify why they never want to leave their homes. Like ever. Conversations with strangers? Eww!

But I’m telling you, for me it was a nice cap to an already terrific day.

You want to spontaneously talk with strangers? Wear a hat. If not, wear the most anonymous clothing you can find.

The Challenges of Staying in Shape

I see them, people not so much older than I, struggling to get in and out of their cars, or to walk from their car to the front door of a Kohl’s or Target. I see motorized wheelchairs, oxygen masks, and walkers. I see labored breathing after a flight of stairs. And I know that not only do none of us get out of here alive, but most of us are going to have significant physical limitations before our bodies finally call it a day.

Still, I’d like to take steps to at least give my body a chance to avoid the worst of it, to recover after an accident or an illness or a surgery. When my wife had an accident last winter and broke six (or was it seven?) ribs, it was a wake-up call to both of us. Neither of us was in as good of shape as we should have been, and it was painfully clear that events are inevitably going to happen to our bodies that require recovery. The better shape we’re in now, the better chance we’ll have to recover quickly and successfully. Something as simple as getting out of a chair can be a terrible burden after an accident, but even more if your muscles aren’t in good working order. Physical fitness matters. For years, I’ve watched guys in workout facilities pump iron like their lives depended on it, and I’ve finally started to realize…they’re lives might depend on it!

And so my wife and I started seeing a personal trainer twice a week. My plan was to see him for three or four months, get a good routine established, and continue the workouts at home. I worked diligently last winter and spring, expanding my repertoire, purchasing mat flooring, a workout bench, some bands and dumbbells, and after a few months, I felt stronger: my movements had become more fluid, I had increased my confidence in exercises like hinges and squats and lunges, and my left knee – for decades the source of on-again, off-again piercing pain – finally got over its persnicketiness. All it took was one additional step up onto a 20-inch plyo box – one that had me groan audibly in pain – and as if my magic, all the knee pain that had plagued me since I was in my 20s disappeared. I can now step up onto 20-inch box without a thought.

Yay for the human body!

I was going along just fine, feeling rather smug about how much by body was improving, continuing my workouts at home plus an occasional check-in with my trainer, when suddenly my neck – also a source of on-again, off-again piercing pain for the past several decades – cried uncle, immobilizing my head to the point where it could barely turn.

Back to the drawing board. I began a three-month period of virtually no working out; that is, not unless you include the dozens of physical therapy sessions I attended at a well-run local clinic. I worked as diligently on my assigned “necksercises” as I had on my normal workout routine, and after months of pain and frustration, my neck began to relax, allowing me to increase my head movement significantly. It’ll probably never be “normal,” but it is much better. It’s at a point where if I can maintain my level of mobility for the rest of my life, I’ll be a happy man.

Yay for the human body!

But then I returned to the gym. It was as if I’d never started working out to begin with. After my first session, I could barely walk for the next two days.

So the journey begins again, trying to establish a functioning human body that has a fighting chance to recover after a fall or a car accident or a surgery. I’m trying. But now I’m proceeding with more caution than last winter. I’m lifting, but not as much. I’m allowed to do overhead pulls, but no longer overhead presses. I have to recognize that as much as I want to get stronger and achieve more fluidity, I also want to be able to move my head. It’s a balancing act, a variation of which I suspect all of us will be navigating for the remainder of our lives.

“Just keep moving,” is my motto these days.  And try to avoid the types of events that will test how fit (or unfit) you really are.

Pursuing Happiness

The pursuit of happiness. Nice idea, but it’s a phrase that’s fraught with pitfalls, and all the more in our age of advertising and social media.

What exactly is happiness, and should it even be a goal? I spoke with a friend of mine a few months back who questioned whether people’s desire to be “happy” hasn’t blocked the perhaps more important pursuit to live life “meaningfully.” Are we basically trading in difficult, long-range pursuits for short-term pleasures? What about working hard at something? Of struggling? Of accomplishing something you didn’t think you could do? Of being resilient under difficult conditions? For those types of challenges, at any given moment you aren’t likely to say that you’re “happy,” but it may be those types of experiences that lead to the greatest feelings of achievement and satisfaction.

In today’s world of social media and advertising, it’s hard not to fall in the trap of constantly comparing one’s life to others. Case in point: I have numerous friends who travel extensively around the world, and when we get together it’s natural for our discussions to include some details about their experiences. I often leave these conversations questioning why I don’t travel more.

But the answer is, because I don’t really want to. I have other stuff I want to do. So why then do I still have that nagging feeling? It probably has something to do with the way humans are wired. There’s a good reason why The Ten Commandments include the edict: “Thou shall not covet.” This isn’t a new thing.

I read an interview with comedian/writer Samantha Irby in The New York Times a while back, and she said something very affirming for me:

The thing where whatever you aspire to is a thing we all should aspire to — I hate it. That kind of messaging just exists to make people feel bad. When you flatten everything into “be happy,” it’s like, what does that mean? It means a different thing for you than it does for me.

Her message really hit home. We don’t all have to be doing the same thing. And we don’t have to take other people’s experiences as models to subscribe to.

But this can be easier said than done. I’ve had numerous discussions with friends and family members who’ve distanced themselves from social media due to its ability to make users feel inadequate and unhappy, and I think this should be STEP ONE in the FEAR OF MISSING OUT RECOVERY PROGRAM. When you’re not constantly being bombarded with photos of what a wonderful time other people are having, it’s easier to pursue the stuff that you want to do without the nagging sense that you should be doing something else.

(An aside: it’s also important to note that what you see on social media isn’t the full story. No one is taking photos of family quarrels, delayed flights or child tantrums.)

The 1980’s version of social media was advertising. I think of the old Carnival Cruise commercial with Kathie Lee Gifford singing, “If they could see me now.” (Talk about selling FOMO!)

I remember watching this commercial wondering why my family didn’t get to go on cruises. (Answer: because it would have been a disaster!). For decades, advertising kept telling me how amazing cruises were, and several friends said the same thing. Then, one day, I actually went on a cruise. It was okay. It met the needs of my particular circumstances, but I won’t be going on another one.

Sometimes what’s being sold to you isn’t actually what’s best for you. Go figure.

So go do what’s best for you, what’s meaningful to you, and try do so with a sense of confidence.

The Pros and Cons of Solitude

“All Alone!
Whether you like it or not,
Alone will be something
you'll be quite a lot.”

-        Dr. Suess, from Oh, The Places You’ll Go

I just took an on-line quiz to determine once and for all if I’m an introvert, an extrovert or somewhere in between (what’s sometimes called an ambivert). For people who know me, I can appear to be an extrovert, but I recall taking the Myers-Briggs personality test in grad school as part of a broader class discussion, and my classmates responding with shock when my test results labeled me as an introvert. To them, I was an active and willing participant in the social life of our close-knit group: I even co-chaired our social committee that led to activities like baseball games, scavenger hunts, and other escapades. To them, that didn’t jibe with the label introvert at all.

But I knew better. I knew that while I indeed craved a social outlet every day – even today, I get anxious if my calendar is lacking pre-planned activities – I also needed alone time, and that without it I’d be one unhappy camper. This is why big gatherings for weekend getaways fill me with anxiety, even if I’m the one who planned the activity! By contrast, sometimes all the interaction I need in a day is a quick conversation with a neighbor and a hello from a cashier.

So, while I think of myself as an ambivert, the test I just took says quite unequivocally that I’m an introvert. Fair enough. I’ll embrace the label.

Which leads me to solitude, from which all my creativity flows.

I think back to being a child in the 70s with two older siblings who went to school while I was left to fill my day with my mother whose parenting style was fairly hands-off. Sure, I played with friends from time to time, but a good chunk of my day was spent as a solo act: I dug up ant hills in the back yard, copied maps, built houses with Lincoln Logs, created abstract pictures with a Spirograph, and collected shotgun shells in the field behind our house (I shit you not – my parents let me wander around a field by myself with a paper grocery bag, collecting yellow, red, orange and green shotgun shells. What could possibly go wrong?).

And I wrote songs. Even before my family inherited my maternal grandparents’ piano, I was composing songs in my head, sometimes sharing them with my classmates in the back of the bus – funny songs about smoking cigarettes (quite edgy for a 6 year-old!) and one about Ohio that sounded oddly like George Baker Selection’s “Paloma Blanca,” one of those AM radio hits that shaped my early ear.

The songwriting never stopped. Shortly after the spinet was delivered to our door and placed in our living room, I was composing tunes, including two that my father painstakingly wrote out on manuscript paper for me. I still have them. One really isn’t a tune at all, but just an organized discovery of triads, but the other is, I must say, kind of impressive. I was no Mozart, that’s for sure, but the song has a good melody and cleverly transitions from a major key to its relative minor – not bad for an 8-year-old.

But all of this was happening because I was alone. Because there was nothing good to watch on TV. Because my older siblings had better things to do than entertain their baby brother. Because my parents weren’t ones to fill up my time. Because my next-door neighbor traveled to Florida for weeks at a time and there was no one to hang with. And because there was no such thing as the internet, smart phones and home computers.

Solitude. I’ve often stated that the two ingredients required for creativity are boredom and silence. This isn’t entirely true – musicians, actors and writers can be extremely creative in group settings – but it rings true for me. As a teenager I worked in retail, and it drove me crazy when my inner songwriting jukebox was unusable because of the Muzak pumping through the speakers overhead. My Orwellian nightmare would undoubtedly include my being exposed to continuous streams of music. Even good music for long periods of time exhausts me the same way conversing at a party for three or four hours can.

I wrote about my need for solitude in my song, “Falling by Degrees.”

I need silence
I need space around me
And it’s okay
It’s got nothing in the world to do with you

And this lyric alludes to the downside of solitude. My need for solitude has probably been misconstrued by some as being standoffish, and I know it’s kept me from exploring fun activities at times because they seemed like too big of a hassle. I’ve said no to outings – especially ones for multiple nights – because I feared I wouldn’t have a way to escape and recharge my batteries. And saying no to activities can snowball; when invitations are rejected, they eventually stop coming. Over the years, I’ve learned to be more careful to say yes to the right things and no to the wrong things, but it’s a tricky balancing act.

These days, as an empty nester whose wife travels quite a lot for work, I am careful to try to plan something social every day. Not ALL day, but a lunch, a phone call or two, a hang with the neighbors…something, just enough to get me out of my head.

And that’s probably the biggest con of being an introvert – being unable to get out of one’s own head. I’ve been there, and it’s not always a pretty place.