When is it time to give up?

The Shrink

You have been working towards a PhD for several years, battling with unsympathetic supervisors, becoming more and more stressed, unable to enjoy your normal leisure activities. So far, you have not even considered giving up, but this year you just wonder whether enough might be enough. But no – you’ve invested so much in it, why become a quitter? You will get there eventually.

Tenacity is of course an essential virtue in life, but its value is so well rehearsed that it ends up being overstated. People often stick with things that are well past their use-by date, stubbornly beavering away at goals that are no longer alive.

The first trap to avoid is basing our decision on how much we have invested in a goal, financially or otherwise. In the case of your PhD, the years of toil and tuition fees paid should be irrelevant. All you need to consider is how much of a priority it is for you right now – not how much it was when you started on it.

The very conviction that persistence is always good was recently challenged by a series of studies on teenagers. Psychologists Gregory Miller and Carsten Wrosch found that the ability to let go of hard-to-reach goals had positive health benefits. They also discovered that, after a period of feeling low, those adolescents who gave up on a goal were able to regroup and set new goals, avoiding the serious depression that might later descend on those who were reluctant to move on.

Of course, if we realise that a goal is simply unattainable, the decision to abandon it should be easy enough to make. While it is not uncommon to fail to spot such an obstacle, shining a little objectivity on it should reveal it for what it is. The really difficult decisions are the ones that involve ditching projects that are attainable but only at a cost to health, relationships or enjoyment of life.

PhD students, you will have to decide whether the costs are worth it, bearing in mind that being a quitter does not always mean being a loser.

The Sage

Kenny Rogers and Aristotle make an unlikely duo, but together they tell you pretty much all you need to know about when to give up.

Aristotle’s most enduring and useful insight was that virtually nothing is good for us if we have too little or too much of it. Determination is the perfect example. Too little, and you are weak and irresolute. Too much, and you are inflexible, blinkered or fanatical. Just right is the eponymous gambler of the Kenny Rogers’ song, who is able to look at the cards he’s got, know when to hold ‘em and know when to fold ‘em.

The gambler gleans this wisdom by weighing up the value of the cards in his hand against the value of those he thinks others might be holding, and the stake on the table. But he doesn’t just do this when he first turns over the cards, sticking to his decision come what may. He always has to be aware of how the situation can change as new information comes to light. A risk worth taking becomes reckless when the stakes rise too high or if you get a better idea of your opponent’s hand.

In real life, the same basic principles apply. When we set out to achieve something, it is because we have decided, at least implicitly, that our goal is both desirable and achievable. But once we get started, reality has a habit of telling us that our initial calculations no longer add up. Sometimes, what changes is simply our own desire.

On other occasions, we might continue to value what we seek just as much, but start to realise that the price of achieving it has risen too high. We have to remember that price includes the opportunity costs of the things we are not doing in our determination to stick it out: think of the sailing with your family you could have been doing all those weekends you dedicated to completing your matchstick model of the Cutty Sark in the shed.

You can sum up the combined wisdom of Athens and Nashville in a simple maxim: too much determination is when our resolution remains the same but the facts, or our knowledge of them, have changed.

The Shrink & The Sage live together in south-west England. Stephen Grosz returns next week