Congratulations, It's Quitters Day (and You Didn't Even Have to Try)
Finding Resilience, Community, and Courage When Others Quit On You
January 21, 2025
Image generated by AI: Imagen 3, with Gemini Advanced 1.5 Pro
The popular fitness app Strava discovered that the second Friday of January marks a significant decrease in activity by its users, in what has now been dubbed “Quitters Day”. The hopeful sense of new year resolutions, harshly and coldly crashes against the demands of real life and we often find ourselves quitting on the person we thought we were going to be, come January. So if you started this week with a new - if slightly less ambitious - view of what your week, month and year will look like, congratulations, you are right there with the data!
But what if instead, you looked at this moment in time as an opportunity to reignite the intention for the year, with resilience, community and courage? An opportunity to not just quit, but instead look at the data as clues. What serves you? What doesn’t? Then act with a newfound sense of your path forward?
In a timely turn of fortune, the January 20th passage in Ryan Holiday’s book “The Daily Stoic” reads:
“Your principles can’t be extinguished unless you snuff out the thoughts that feed them, for it’s continually in your power to reignite new ones…. It’s possible to start living again! See things anew as you once did - that is how to restart life!”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 7.2
Two years ago, someone quit on me just around Quitters Day. Well, maybe more accurately a corporation, not just an individual. Together with 12,000 other magnificent people, I had an email in my personal inbox at 2:06AM PST letting me know that due to a reduction in workforce my role no longer existed. Never an email felt more impersonal and personal at the same time. The layoff wasn’t happening to me, but despite me. Had it not been me, it was someone else in my exact same place. It was not personal. Most things aren’t.
That morning I had woken up and immediately checked my phone, as I normally do (yeah yeah, I’m addicted to my phone). By then I had at least 3 different messages asking me “Are you ok?”. “Yes?”, I thought, assuming an earthquake had hit northern California during the night, which had gone unnoticed in my slumber. “No, check your email - Google has laid off thousands of people”. There was this running joke with a lot of friends in the company that every time we made a mistake logging in, it was actually not a mistake, and we were fired. But this time, when I attempted a second login, I still couldn’t connect. “Check your personal email”, my friend added. “I’m checking. I’m checking.”
Screenshot from January 20 2023, when trying to troubleshoot access issues, ahead of discovering the news, void of any internal information
I read the email several times, to make sure my eyes were not tricking me. “We have some difficult news to share” - surely they’re just telling me about the layoffs of others. After all, I had just saved the company thousands of hours through my operations design work, which was due to save them several hundreds of thousands of dollars in only a few months, not to mention the literal justice it was bringing to millions of children who had been victims of abuse. I know it’s a big company, with big numbers, but that’s still something, I argued… Then fear settled as I realized the email was about me, and the implications of soon losing my visa, the only thing keeping me in the country. That is when the tears started.
What happened after that felt like a whirlwind with some of the most beautiful demonstrations of community, courage and resilience - quitting, not so much.
Friends called me to ask what I needed; partners from work (that I didn’t even realize had me in such high regard) provided glowing recommendations; people across Tech, Trust & Safety and the Bay Area emailed their managers telling them about this “awesome Googler with demonstrated high impact and performance looking for a new job”.
My therapist told me “despite the obvious stress, this is the calmest I’ve seen you since I’ve met you” - Ha! ADHD really DOES work great in emergency situations, I laughed, as my vision never felt clearer. My husband turned back on his athlete brain - usually at rest, but always inside of him - keeping our focus on what truly mattered, remaining calm on the outside while ready to compete on the inside, and never once replacing the word “we” for “you” or “I”. One friend grabbed my outdated CV and re-wrote it all by himself based on my LinkedIn information, so that I could focus on mourning, networking and researching my immigration options. Another friend - who had also lost his job and his work visa - invited me to his rooftop twelve hours after the dreaded email, and together we laughed at our misfortune, a behavior that is characteristic to the two of us, humorous people with a propensity for dark cynicism.
Where one gave up on me, hundreds stepped up. And so did I.
Two years ago, Quitters Day gained a new meaning, when the decision to quit was made for me. We don’t always have the privilege to decide what doors to open and what doors to close. We can, however, step up to what is in front of us.
Here are resilient ways to do that:
1. Practice resilience persistently
Resilience is not the unbothered acceptance for what comes at you, but the persistent ability to get back up even when you fall. Every time you fall. Eventually. Maybe not today. But soon.
Two years ago I cried, I complained, I disagreed, I understood, and I saw the magic and opportunity that would come from such a change (even if that change felt thrust upon me).
My resilience was not my lack of emotion, but my full ability to explore emotions and use them to find gratitude in what Google had unintentionally given me. A new path.
Resilience, then, means being able to crash and giving yourself the space to feel low, to doubt, to stop, and to step back. All these as ways to experience the full spectrum of emotions of your lived experiences. It’s a way to process them, learn from them, and come back stronger and sharper.
And in that space of emotional reflection, you might be successful in finding clarity in your values and desires, so that any action you take next is one of intention.
2. Harness the power of your community
Share what is going on. Ask for help. Not everyone in your community will know when or how to step up without a clear request, but support may come from unexpected places when you most need it.
Some people will be a shoulder to cry on, some will be the sound of laughter, some will be a head to brainstorm with, some will be the glowing eyes of hope that keep you motivated, some will be the fist that keeps you accountable, some will be the hands that pull up their sleeves and share the burden.
All those play different roles in your village - and all roles make your village supportive and strong.
3. Find courage and opportunity
What can this closed door mean? What does it say about how I view myself? What does it tell me about the paths that I have in front of me, the ones that are hidden behind the grapevine that I ignore?
For me, it was the path of entrepreneurship; the one that sounded scary and hard and exactly-what-I-needed-but-I-consistently-ignored-because-why-would-I-leave-this-tech-company-with-so-much-talent-and-opportunity?
Now that you are out of your comfort zone anyway, what uncomfortable things can you try? Better yet, what if you don’t have to wait for a layoff to explore hidden paths, and you simply start… today?
Quitters Day is the rule and not the exception because it is in our human tendency to waver when expectations meet reality, things get tough, and obstacles arise. It may be particularly true to you, dear reader, if you started your year with a re-org announcement, a surprise meeting with your manager and HR on your calendar, a leader you don’t believe in taking office, an unexpected medical news, or an overly optimistic workout commitment (were you really ever going to work out at 4.30AM?).
“If others have already quit on you, what difference would it make if you did the same? Why show hope where others have shown despair?”
As doubt casts its shadow and quitting feels like the natural next step, can you show up for yourself with resilience, community and courage? Can you take a step back and take another look at your values and desires so as to design ambitions that align with who you are, who you want to become and the world you want around you?
The only wrong thing (if I may be so bold) is to not take action in any direction, to not live according to your values or needs, or to not return to your values, once you have realized you steered off course.
Resting and reconvening are part of the journey.
The only wrong thing is quitting on yourself.
That is the true meaning of quitting.
