“Quitters never win and winners never quit”, said Vince Lombardi, 5-time NFL Championship winner. It’s an inspiring statement but the reality is that winners quit all the time. They just know what to quit. If you’re serious about getting the most out of your life – your career, your relationships, your health – should you be quitting your money?
Hiking Everest, opening a Wine Bar in Melbourne, Getting a PGA tour card, writing a ground-breaking book: the list goes on and on. We are lucky enough to work with some pretty amazing people and they all have big plans for the future. We also work with scores of people giving 100% to their careers or to families or their own fitness. To borrow a term from world-famous entrepreneur Seth Godin, these people are all in the Dip.
“The Dip is the long slog between starting something and mastery. A long slog that’s actually a shortcut, because it gets you to where you want to go faster than any other path.”
Dips require effort. The Dips that are worth pursuing require a lot of effort. But it’s worth it. You may also be in the Dip if you are passionately investing time into any of the below:
- Career progression / further education
- Growing your own business
- Giving your children the best chance in life
- Health and fitness / sport
Genuine pursuit of any of these goals will dominate your time and energy, with other less important things being cast aside. This is very normal and it’s very smart. As Seth explains, “Quitting the stuff that you don’t care about or the stuff you’re mediocre at… frees up your resources to obsess about the Dips that matter.”
Does this give you permission to simply focus on the things you enjoy? Not quite. Dips can easily be confused with ‘dead ends’. The dead ends are the situations where you work and you work and you work and nothing much changes. It doesn’t get a lot better, it doesn’t get a lot worse. It just is.
Dead ends need to be strategically quit. Fast. “Strategic quitting is a conscious decision that you make based on the choices that are available to you. If you realise that you’re at a dead end compared to what you could be investing in, quitting is not only a reasonable choice, it’s a smart one.”
Quitting is not giving up. You can quit something and not neglect it – this is called delegation. If you and your partner work tirelessly in pursuit of your career goals, time spent mowing the lawns each weekend may not be the best use of your time. Hire a gardener. Many people ask, ‘Can we afford to do this?’ If you are in a Dip working toward something that will substantially improve your life, the question may be, ‘Can we afford not to do this?’
This makes more sense if we think about one of our clients, such as the PGA aspirant, and his approach toward money. He has thought hard about managing his finances and decided that, for him, this is a dead end. The strategic quitting of this role has allowed him to focus on other Dips more important. Put simply, he sees a financial adviser because he wants to get the very most out of his life.
If you are serious about getting the most from your own life, we’d love to hear from you.
James O’Reilly is the Director of Northeast, a fast-growing financial advice firm that empowers clients to achieve meaningful financial progress and well-being. He's also the co-host of the Australian Retirement Podcast, one of Australia's fastest-growing podcasts.