Quitting Is Not the Opposite of Perseverance

CBS recently produced a piece called Why Quitting Can Be a Better Option and some of the points resonate with the empirical literature within industrial-organizational and employee psychology. The piece seems more relevant than ever in recent years given the dynamic trends in voluntary and involuntary turnover.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies were reducing their workforces amid economic uncertainty and a sudden disappearance of the traditional in-person office environment. Later came the Great Resignation, where the world was catapulted into an almost artificial world of work dependent on remote productivity, increasing demand and forcing innovation among technology-based companies and other sectors that primarily leveraged modern technology for their services.

The Great Resignation gave the plethora of college-educated symbolic analysts and white-collar workers greater empowerment to leave their jobs and go where they wanted as demand for them surged. Of course, the world would rebound from that mass-hiring slope into a multiyear cooling period whose ramifications are still being felt.

Enter the Big Stay and the “low hire, low fire” environment.

“Job hugging” became a concept as employees clung to their jobs, while “quiet quitting” captured another side of the same general unease: employees remaining in jobs without necessarily maintaining the same psychological investment in them. The bargaining power that workers held during the Great Resignation had shifted considerably back toward employers.

The data reflect that shift. In July 2026, U.S. employers reported approximately 7.3 million job openings, 5.1 million hires, and 3.1 million voluntary quits (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics [BLS], 2026).

The cool-off continues from that empowered-employee period. Look no further than your daily LinkedIn feed and the modern zeitgeist of involuntary termination or reduction-in-force is likely right at the top. It is brutal to see, particularly as some people have found themselves in job searches lasting a year or longer. It is saddening to think that good, hardworking, educated people with families to feed are pleading for employment online.

The college degree is not the automatic foot in the door for steady and secure income that people sometimes assumed it would be. And in a labor market where switching jobs has become substantially less frictionless, voluntarily quitting can almost feel like a luxury if someone can afford to do it.

1. 2022 · Annual average

   Great Resignation

   2.8%

   U.S. quits rate

2. July 2026 · Preliminary

   Lower-mobility labor market

   ~1.9%

   U.S. quits rate

Two snapshots: a 2022 annual average and a seasonally adjusted monthly rate for July 2026.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey. 2022 annual review; July 2026 release.

Who Actually Quits?

Who ends up quitting their job in reality?

Classic models of turnover generally focused on dissatisfaction, withdrawal cognitions, and the attractiveness of alternatives. The unfolding model of voluntary turnover broadened that picture considerably, showing that people can leave through several different decision paths, including reactions to major “shocks” that cause them to reevaluate their current situation (Lee & Mitchell, 1994; Lee et al., 1999).

The shock might be a negative event like being passed over for a promotion, a leadership change, or some other jarring workplace experience, but it can also be an opportunity that suddenly makes another path salient. In other cases, dissatisfaction simply accumulates until leaving becomes more attractive than staying.

One of CBS's opening interviewers begins the discussion by remarking:

“We are so often taught that the person who perseveres, who pushes ahead, is successful.”

There is something to be said for this sentiment: perseverance and resilience are frequently associated with better outcomes.

In contrast to the classic Five-Factor Model of personality, openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism, grit was popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth as another trait of interest to organizational researchers and practitioners. Duckworth and colleagues (2007) found grit predictive of several achievement-related outcomes even after accounting for variables including IQ and conscientiousness, although grit itself substantially overlaps with conscientiousness.

Yeo and Neal (2008) also found that cognitive ability and conscientiousness were relevant to how subjective cognitive effort changed as task demands increased. Broadly, individuals differ in the resources and self-regulatory tendencies they can draw upon as work becomes more challenging.

Generally, research does support the idea that being resilient and putting one foot in front of the other leads to better outcomes.

It is better to continue swimming than to sink.

However, journalist Lindsay Crouse, author of The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out, goes on to remark:

“I think we're often taught that quitting and persevering are complete opposites, and that's not true at all. If we really want to succeed, we have to learn to quit.”

She continues that giving up on a failing path may be the only way to find one that works better.

There is a lot of truth in her sentiment.

In many regards, quitting in itself can be a greater act of perseverance.

If you remain in a job that is seemingly repetitive, monotonous, without development, or perhaps ultimately stressful as far as the environment or leadership, but which also provides security in terms of income and stability for your family, then those circumstances certainly take perseverance to continue in.

But it might be a greater act of resilience and grit to go into the unknown.

To pursue that dream of starting your own company.

To take the leap and go back to school at a later part of your career and enter a drastically different field.

To navigate a lack of income for an extended period while having faith that you can still provide for yourself and those around you, potentially while starting from scratch.

Crouse goes on to ask how those experiences compare with the positive emotions we associate with persistence:

“We feel so many emotions: joy, a sense of accomplishment, satisfaction. Can you achieve those same emotions when you quit?”

Control Theory: Where You Are Versus Where You Want to Be

While that sense of the unknown and lack of stability is uneasy for most of us, theory suggests quitting could sometimes produce the greater long-term payoff in terms of satisfaction and goal attainment.

Control theory is one of the most prevalent metatheories of information processing and motivation. The basic idea is that we continually compare our current state with a desired state and regulate our behavior in an attempt to mitigate the gap between the two (Carver & Scheier, 1990).

1. Current stateWhere am I now?
2. DiscrepancyWhat separates the current state from the desired state?
3. RegulationContinue the current path
   OR
   change the path
4. Desired stateWhere am I trying to go?

Persistence is useful only when the current path is actually reducing the discrepancy.

It is one of those theories that becomes almost impossible not to see once you understand it.

At every micro and macro level of life, we see this urge to mitigate the gap between where something is and where we want it to be. That can range from the number of walking steps it takes to get from your couch to your refrigerator while sitting there hungry, to being a young child who hopes to become a parent one day despite all the years that will have to pass before that desired state becomes possible.

Crouse then makes what I think is one of the most interesting points in the discussion:

“Continuing and persevering can sometimes be quite passive. It can just be kind of sliding down the path that you're on.”

She calls quitting a bold and courageous act.

That same logic applies to perseverance in quitting and pursuing your greatest goals.

In your current state, you may have the comforts of a job, income, routine, and social stability. But your desired state, and perhaps the state with the greatest long-term return on investment, may be many steps away from what you currently know.

This is also where feedback theory becomes relevant, although the research is somewhat more nuanced than simply saying “negative feedback makes us work harder.”

Kluger and DeNisi's (1996) meta-analysis found that feedback interventions improved performance on average, but more than one-third actually reduced performance. Their Feedback Intervention Theory proposes that feedback becomes less effective as attention shifts away from the task and increasingly toward the self.

In other words, information about a discrepancy can be enormously useful, but only if we are able to use it to regulate rather than simply defend ourselves against it.

There is something to the colloquial idea that “we must be comfortable being uncomfortable.” Challenge, uncertainty, and novelty can force change precisely because they disrupt the equilibrium we already know.

Quitting After 20 Years

Television journalist Vlad Duthiers echoes the sentiment of taking the leap after decades of persevering in one role, only to restart at the bottom of another:

“I wish I had had this book when I quit my job of 20 years to become an unpaid intern at CNN.”

And we often hear some version of this sentiment:

Quitting was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

Or even:

Getting fired was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

It is true for many people, including myself.

One of the best things I've ever done was leave a good, but demanding, role where I was working roughly 60 hours a week, while trying to balance finishing my dissertation. I went on to start my own LLC, build out my own website from raw code, complete my dissertation research, and become university faculty, all while traveling the world.

Quitting was easily one of the best decisions I've ever made.

Staying may be persistence when…

• the problem is temporary
• development is still occurring
• conditions can realistically improve
• the decision to leave is primarily driven by one bad day
• the current path is still moving toward the desired state

Quitting may be persistence when…

• the problem is structural and persistent
• development has meaningfully stalled
• the environment is unlikely to change
• leaving reflects deliberation rather than immediate emotion
• staying increasingly moves the person away from the desired state

A decision framework synthesized from the concepts discussed in this article; not a validated assessment.

Courageous or Impulsive?

Vlad goes on to ask a thoughtful and important question:

“How do you distinguish between what could be a courageous decision to leave your job versus an impulsive one that might create unnecessary financial or even professional risk?”

Lindsay Crouse replies with sound advice:

“Do not quit on a bad day. You want to take a premeditated approach. You want to be calculated. You want to be smart about it.”

That distinction is important.

Being impulsive or volatile in quitting, or in most consequential professional decisions, can obviously lead to harmful outcomes. The famous delay-of-gratification paradigm illustrates the broader psychological importance of being able to tolerate an immediate impulse in service of a longer-term reward (Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999).

More directly relevant to careers, Boswell et al. (2009) found what they termed honeymoon and hangover effects following job changes: satisfaction can initially rise after entering a new organization and subsequently decline as the novelty of the new situation wears off.

So leaving should not itself be romanticized.

Acting with restraint, thoughtfulness, and deliberation is generally a better recipe for making a major career decision than reacting to one terrible day.

What Will Your Future Self Think?

A great sentiment Crouse emphasizes later in the discussion is the possibility of regretting the decisions we do not make.

Will it eventually be more costly not to quit and instead to remain in a job that is comfortable but potentially unfulfilling relative to your broader goals and motivations in life?

Crouse asks:

“What legacy are you leaving to yourself five or ten years down the line? How will that person feel?”

This connects particularly well with research on future work selves.

Anseel, Strauss, and Lievens (2018) describe how representations of our future working selves can shape the way we seek and respond to feedback. Their framework integrates Feedback Intervention Theory with construal-level theory or the idea that psychologically distant events tend to be represented at a more abstract, higher level.

When negative information is extremely proximal to the current self, people may become defensive and engage in self-enhancement: protecting and reaffirming who they already believe themselves to be.

A salient future work self creates greater psychological distance. Instead of solely defending the present self, the individual can think in terms of self-improvement and ask whether current behavior is actually moving them toward the person they hope to become.

That fits almost perfectly with the quitting question.

Instead of only asking:

How uncomfortable would quitting be right now?

you can ask:

Where do I actually want to be five or ten years from now, and is remaining here moving me toward it?

Once again, this echoes control theory and the discrepancy between where you are versus where you want to be.

Micro-Quitting, Subtraction, and Knowing When Something Needs to Change

The rest of the interview is really interesting too and I would encourage people to watch it rather than have me write another 2,000 words explaining the entire thing.

Crouse goes on to distinguish micro-quitting from the much larger act of leaving a job altogether. Rather than immediately taking the massive leap, sometimes the first step is simply removing something.

She describes how our impulse when facing a problem is often additive:

“I have a problem. I need to throw an intervention at it, like a diet or a new routine or a hack.”

But sometimes, she argues, the answer is taking something away.

There is actually research behind this. Across a series of experiments, Adams et al. (2021) found that people systematically overlooked subtractive changes when trying to improve objects, ideas, and situations. We seem to have a tendency to ask what we can add before considering what we can remove.

I'm not sure I agree that subtraction is inherently better than addition.

But I do believe strongly in the broader importance of change.

Sometimes that means quitting a job.

Sometimes it means quitting one responsibility, routine, project, or behavior that is making the rest of your life substantially harder.

And sometimes it means acknowledging that just because you can continue doing something does not necessarily mean that you should.

The interview also goes into gender differences in quitting and persistence, including Crouse's argument that women may sometimes endure circumstances simply because they are capable of enduring them. There are potentially interesting connections there to research on agency, communion, gender roles, and gender schemas, but that is probably another article rather than something worth carelessly tacking onto the end of this one.

The larger point is already difficult enough.

Perseverance is important.

There are countless circumstances where the right answer is to continue putting one foot in front of the other.

But perseverance toward a larger goal does not necessarily require perseverance along one particular path.

Sometimes quitting is impulsive.

Sometimes quitting is avoidance.

Sometimes quitting is the wrong decision.

And sometimes quitting one thing is exactly what allows you to keep going toward something that matters more.

References

1. Adams, G. S., Converse, B. A., Hales, A. H., & Klotz, L. E. (2021). People systematically overlook subtractive changes. Nature, 592, 258–261. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03380-y

2. Anseel, F., Strauss, K., & Lievens, F. (2018). How future work selves guide feedback seeking and feedback responding at work. In D. L. Ferris, R. E. Johnson, & C. Sedikides (Eds.), The self at work: Fundamental theory and research (pp. 295–318). Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315626543-13

3. Boswell, W. R., Shipp, A. J., Payne, S. C., & Culbertson, S. S. (2009). Changes in newcomer job satisfaction over time: Examining the pattern of honeymoons and hangovers. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(4), 844–858. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014975

4. Carver, C. S., & Scheier, M. F. (1990). Principles of self-regulation: Action and emotion. In E. T. Higgins & R. M. Sorrentino (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition: Foundations of social behavior (Vol. 2). Guilford Press.

5. Duckworth, A. L., Peterson, C., Matthews, M. D., & Kelly, D. R. (2007). Grit: Perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(6), 1087–1101. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.1087

6. Kluger, A. N., & DeNisi, A. (1996). The effects of feedback interventions on performance: A historical review, a meta-analysis, and a preliminary feedback intervention theory. Psychological Bulletin, 119(2), 254–284. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.119.2.254

7. Lee, T. W., & Mitchell, T. R. (1994). An alternative approach: The unfolding model of voluntary employee turnover. Academy of Management Review, 19(1), 51–89.

8. Lee, T. W., Mitchell, T. R., Holtom, B. C., McDaniel, L. S., & Hill, J. W. (1999). The unfolding model of voluntary turnover: A replication and extension. Academy of Management Journal, 42(4), 450–462.

9. Metcalfe, J., & Mischel, W. (1999). A hot/cool-system analysis of delay of gratification: Dynamics of willpower. Psychological Review, 106(1), 3–19.

10. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2026). Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey: July 2026.

11. Yeo, G., & Neal, A. (2008). Subjective cognitive effort: A model of states, traits, and time. Journal of Applied Psychology, 93(3), 617–631. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.93.3.617