Giving Up 2.0

A couple of weeks ago, I took the time to write about Giving Up. If you haven’t read the article, I encourage you to do so. We received a couple comments with a negative reaction to the usage of the term. Debra, had this to say::

First of all, I want to say two things:

1) I love feedback like this. I’m so honored that I wrote something that made you think about how to frame things positively. Thank you for reading Debra.
2) I love words and their impact. I will never minimize the power of words. Words can start a war, create true love, destroy relationships and establish life long bonds. It is with words that we say promise to be with someone forever in a wedding. It is with words that our parents teach us. Words can be on occasion both therapeutic and destructive simultaneously.

Sometimes, I literally obsess over vernacular. As an aspiring writer, I adore words. Today, I want to talk about this phrase: Giving Up.

I have a general rule that I learned from James Altucher: if something I write is uncomfortable, and makes me feel vulnerable as I hit publish, chances are I took a sufficient risk that it may be worth the read. If the text is not at least somewhat polarizing, it’s probably not worth hitting publish and it probably just means I’m spewing some regurgitated truths that everyone agrees with already. Today, I hope I say something you disagree with. It means I’m pushing the envelope and maybe getting someone to think.

We are taught from a young age to Never Give Up. The idea of giving up and of quitting is synonymous with losing. And it would be easy to judge me a failure by my using the phrase that I gave up on my goal to run a marathon. So do I want to retract my statements on giving up? Change the title?

Absolutely not. I stand by my phrasing 100% and I think that the objection to it proves my point further.

Giving up should not be seen as a negative thing unless you are doing it for the wrong reasons.

Michaelangelo, the renaissance sculptor who wikipedia also confirms is an orange wearing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle who likes nunchuks, famously said this about his masterpiece, the Statue of David when asked how he carved something so magnificent from one single piece of marble:

I just removed everything that wasn’t David.

But this is not the divisive part, obviously.

Everyone agrees with the idea that we must chip away at the excess and only hold on to the essential. Become our own version of David. What our dear readers were concerned about is that the negativity associated with giving up may make a potential weight loser feel like a failure. And this is the point I wish to address today.

What is negative about giving up?

In our culture, we sensationalize the idea of the individual who plays through the pain and the struggle. Mohammed Ali is regularly quoted and posted on Instagram this quote:

We love stories about Football players playing with broken bones. The hero in the movie gets shot and keeps fighting. I even told the story about Teddy Roosevelt famously being shot and finishing his speech last week. This kind of raw perseverance is oftentimes the difference between attaining a goal and failing to do so.

But this kind of dogged determinism can also be an enormous detriment. Sometimes we play hurt and we never recover. Instead of cleaning our room, we throw it under the bed. We don’t wait long enough between workouts. We become so determined to keep sawing that we refuse to make time to sharpen the saw. We’d rather die trying than quit and while sometimes that’s the right course of action more often than not, it isn’t.

Giving up Vs. Changing Gears

I suppose in the end, it’s probably just semantics. But I feel like to use a term like changing gears is to minimize the true gravity of the situation and one of the core tenets of Stoicism. Stoicism promises the ability to recover from tragedy, trial and tribulation quickly by seeing these things exactly as they are: not overstating or understating their importance and effect. And one of the ways this is best accomplished is by not having emotional ties to impermanent things like external goals and objectives. We can enjoy the positive and beautiful things of life, but the second we cannot imagine a life without them or the moment we have trouble walking away from them, we have the kinds of emotional ties that set us up for tragedy.

Such emotional ties to things and people cannot be altogether ignored. We love our families and friends. We have emotional ties to our jobs, maybe our cars or homes. And even when we set a goal, we might also set our heart on accomplishing it to the point that it’s all we can think about and to fail in this goal would be tenamount to failure in life.

So on the contrarary, I feel like using the phrase giving up helps us see a no longer relevant goal for exactly what it is: unworthy of our time and attention. Giving up suggests a certain emotional tie to that which we are walking away from, which in the case of me and my marathon was an actual thing. It was such a romantic ideal. I had changed a majority of my passwords to have some kind of marathon mneumonic. My gym locker room combination was 2620 (as in 26.2 miles). I was running 4 times a week. I was obsessed with a goal.

A goal that I hated. And loved. It was an abusive marriage to say the least. But I wanted it to last and to work. If I just kept at it, maybe we’d learn to love each other again.

But in the end, sometimes we have to be willing to submit. It’s so much more than changing gears. Changing gears is a breeze in the winds of change. Giving up? That’s a big life decision but not an excuse to beat yourself up.

We frequently worry about any negativity in a weight loss journey being a potential trigger for relapse. But that feels to me like blaming a car accident on weather conditions when we could have checked ahead of time road conditions and been prepared. We might be tempted to blame adultery on the girl/man that seduced the married man/woman but wouldn’t we be better served looking at the root causes of the married person’s willingness to break their wedding vows?

To walk down a long weight loss journey, one must be prepared for a little negativity here and a little failure here and to sugar coat that is to do the weight loss candidate a disservice in my humble opinion.

TLDR: I feel like the problem isn’t with a weight loss person feeling negative as much as it is that we shouldn’t feel negative giving things up because we need to avoid being so emotionally involved with them. We do what we do with integrity and we walk away from things honestly and when it makes sense to do so.

Hence, start preparing now to give up. Avoid emotional ties to goals that make you play hurt and risk your sanity and health. Give up all the garbage that holds you back and sometimes it’s ok to give up on a goal.

You can change gears too of course, but I can’t say it that way because sugar coating things isn’t #Paleo.