What if you never started?

This post is dedicated to Reggie Butler, who taught us to see beyond our understanding. RIP, my friend.

Dear Readers,

Time’s come to close a chapter on The Quitting Corp project.

It’s like this: as I’ve moved away from my role at Google, I’ve become both gardener and garden. At first, the “garden” – me – was unkempt: weeds pulling in every direction, too much shade from tall trees all around, keeping the undergrowth stunted.

Through each essay I worked on, giving my readers and myself permission to start again, I discarded all that had previously defined my identity: title, compensation, the constant sprinting mentality, and the notion that I was important because I was very busy. As Ann Patchett says, we’re a “compost heap” into which everything we experience goes to break down and become part of a rich humus from which new ideas grow.

As I poured what I believe into Quitting Corp, the garden cleaned itself up, with space for new plantings. Now, there’s enough new growth that each time I stop to write another Quitting Corp essay so I can maintain a regular two-week publishing cadence, I have to open a path into the furthest corner of the garden. Getting there messes up some parts of the new, still tender parts that have taken root.

As a gardener, I’m no longer enjoying the back-and-forth. So, to stay coherent with the seasons (and lessons) of Quitting Corp, I will take a step back from writing about my own reinvention.

You may hear from me again through this channel, but less often than when I started. Instead of writing towards a biweekly deadline, I’ll post when I have something relevant and new to say.

Can you quit if you never started?

Before I run: a while back, a reader asked me, “What if you never quite started?” The way I understood the question, the reader was asking me where to start if one isn’t leaving one thing for another and can’t reinvent themselves because there was nothing there before?

Nothing is easy about that, and never more complicated than at this very in-our-face moment when you can’t not know that 42 million Americans rely on SNAP benefits to feed themselves, and one executive is promised 1 trillion dollars over 10 years to deliver results for one of his many billion-dollar companies.

1,000,000,000,000.

It’s enough to stump you. As is my reader’s question.

When they first asked, and it's been a while, I eagerly promised to write about it. “Challenge accepted,” I thoughtlessly said.

I have thought about it. And the truth is that I simply don’t know.

I don’t know how you’d start from zero. I know that it isn’t for lack of trying. Trying hard as you do, dear reader, too often isn’t enough. It’s heartbreaking to write. It’s dishonest not to say it.

I don’t know how to reconcile the brokenness of everything right now.

Time for reflection

Everything I know and have written about in the last year requires you to have built sufficient financial and cognitive reserves to leap forward with confidence. Alas, to turn around, say ‘yippee,’ and do something else requires privilege that too many people don’t have.

I don’t like not knowing, and there aren’t many good answers out there. Well, there ARE answers and systems that work better than ours. An easy internet search answers that question (try: which countries are more equitable than the US and why is the US falling behind?).

I do know this: my reader’s not alone in asking.

The fact that this question stumps me - that I’ve been writing for a year and still can’t answer it - tells me something important. I think that what it says is that the answer isn’t in what any one person does. It’s in what we build and grow together.

I’ll see you when I figure out what that means.

Flavia

PS - After I finished writing this post, I learned that Reggie Butler, founder and CEO of Performance Paradigm, had passed. I worked closely with Reggie back when creating more inclusive leadership was a priority. Everything I learned from him made me a better human. As he intended. The rock pictured above, on a grassy patch in my garden, sits on my desk and reminds me of him and the mantra written on it, every single day.