Spiritual Sundays: Quitting to Win

The day of pretending that I'm a wise minister and that people are actually paying attention to my sermons.

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"Winners never quit,

And quitters never win"

It's a well known phrase that I grew up with. Not that it was something my parents taught me. It was something that was taught to all of us, my whole generation and the generations before and the generations afterwards, as if it was an immutable fact etched in stone like the ten commandments. Along with it came stories of successful people who beat the odds and kept working at it in spite of all the hurdles and the times they wanted to quit but didn't. But the phrasing is all wrong. Here's the truth.

"Winners quit and quitters win."

What they never told in those stories, are all the times those successful people quit. Winners quit all kinds of things before they find the thing they're successful at. And often they will quit that thing to, to go off and do another thing. How many successful business people, sell off their businesses, quit that industry, and go off and start a new business? A lot.

And for a lot of people, the purpose of making money is so they can quit and play golf. Which

for them, makes them winners since they now have the freedom to do what they please with their time.

But before they do that, they quit a lot of things along the way. Things they start and don't finish. Things they try out. Things they learned and discovered that they don't have time for. Not every kid in the school band is going to keep playing their instrument for the rest of their life. Not every ballerina is going to do ballet forever. Very few kids that play soccer make it to the pros.

People quit things all the time and go on to be successful at other things.

It's actually kind of the law of life. There's only so many hours in a day, and you often have to let some things go in order to concentrate on other things. That garage band you were in as a teenager was great fun but you never hit it big and now you're happy working for a non-profit helping people and you got there by quitting law school because you realized it wasn't for you, and your guitar is somewhere in a closet but you don't have time to pick it up because you have kids, and work and a marriage and the community choir, and you teach Sunday School. And maybe you're not making tons of money and have a big house and you're not on the top ten most beautiful list, but you are happy and possibly one day you'll restring that guitar and join an old folks garage band playing the hits you used to play and you'll have fun doing it.

In a bad relationship? It may be time to quit. Especially if that relationship is robbing you of the very energy and abilities you need to achieve your goals. In a job you hate? Then maybe it's time to find another job and quit the one you have. Do you have an addiction? That would certainly be something worth quitting because keeping on with that isn't going to make you a winner at all. I wanted to find a verse in the bible about quitting and winning. Do you know I couldn't find a single one? It may be there but I couldn't find it. So I quit looking. Which tells me that maybe quitting and winning aren't things that are important to God. Maybe God doesn't care about your trophy case, or your billion dollar bank account, or where your sports team ranks in the league. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't care, but it could mean that in your goal to win, you might be missing out on more important things. My kids have told me that I'm the most competitive person they know. That was years ago and I'm sure they've met people since then. But they were basing it on my love of board games. I was not the parent that let my kids win. When I play Monopoly, there's no forgiving debts, no second chances, no payment plans, no loaning money with no interest. You give me the money or get out of the game. And I do this while twirling my mustache. And then when I win I do a victory dance which I think is really quite charming. According to my kids, I win all the time. It's all in fun - at least to me it is, because I don't behave that way in anything else. Really, honestly I don't. At least I don't think so. Because I don't really have a mustache to twirl. But my kids paid me back for it. When it came to playing Risk, they ganged up on me. They teamed up and got me out of the game as soon as possible and then once I was gone it was every person for themself and I was left on the sidelines.

I have never got satisfaction from being on the sidelines. I was relegated to reading a book or watching a movie by myself while everyone else was having fun leaving me out. And now I'm sad.

I'm not sure what the point of that story is except that it's about winning. Oh well, I'm keeping it in, just in case someone else can make a connection to it. I don't win so much while playing them anymore. They're older and wiser. And I'm older and losing brain cells.

Anyway, back to the quitting winning thing that didn't even make it to the bible.

Sometimes, it's okay to quit, because that's what winners do.