![]() The catch was that while the winner got the $20, the bidder who came in second had to pay the amount of his bid, but got nothing in return. He gave an example of an experiment by a Harvard professor who auctioned off a $20 bill. “There is a huge amount of social and psychological forces keeping people from quitting,” Ori Brafman said. The answer, Professor Vohs said, is perhaps “stepping back temporarily and saying, ‘I’m going to try to live a healthy life and not try so hard to lose weight.’ ” So if a person concentrates on that goal, she may have fewer internal resources to deal with other challenging situations in life, like a demanding boss or an angry spouse. “One of the most frustrating goals for people is weight loss or weight loss maintenance,” Professor Vohs said. She said that people need internal resources to attain their goals, and “if you are a pursuing a goal that is constantly frustrating, you will be less successful in goal attainment in other areas of life. Vohs, a professor of marketing at the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, has also studied the issue, largely in relation to people who regularly overspend and to chronic dieters. We have to realize, he said, that “this relentless pursuit of goals has a cost to it.” In particular, studies of older people found that they were happier if they found new goals to pursue once giving up on the old ones, in contrast with those who abandoned their previous aims without substituting anything new. Professor Miller is not advocating forsaking your dreams, just shifting to those that may be more manageable. “How do you draw the line between what’s attainable and what’s not?” “That’s the million-dollar question,” Professor Miller said. The difficulty lies in knowing when to abandon one goal and move on to something else. The goals, chosen by the participants in the subject, tended to revolve around academic success or body image, Professor Miller said. ![]() The study found those who could not renounce hard-to-attain goals showed increased levels of the inflammatory molecule C-reactive protein, which is linked to such health problems as heart disease, diabetes and early aging in adults. In the September issue of the journal Psychological Science, Professor Miller, along with Carsten Wrosch, associate professor of psychology at Concordia University, reported that they had followed 90 teenagers for one year. Professor Miller and his colleagues have followed college students, older people and the parents of children with cancer and found that, in many cases, moving from a difficult goal to another, more attainable, one can create a greater sense of well-being, both mentally and physically. Gregory Miller, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, has helped write a number of studies on quitting, or in the scientific parlance, “disengaging from goals.” The trick, of course, is to know when it’s right to walk away and when it’s not. “They just quit the right stuff at the right time.” Lombardi coined the “quitters never win” quote. “Americans have been brainwashed by Vince Lombardi,” said Seth Godin, author of the book “The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick).” (Portfolio, 2007). A quitter is a loser or, even worse, a traitor someone who doesn’t hang in when the going gets tough, someone who lets her team down. In general, quitting is perceived as bad. Throughout life, we pretty much get those two contradictory messages about quitting. Olympians embody one of the great clichés about quitting: “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” My athletic career, on the other hand, is summed up by the other platitude about quitting: “You’ve gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.” ![]() I think about how maybe if I had just worked harder much harder at gymnastics when I was young, I could have reached that lofty goal (conveniently forgetting how ill-suited I was to the sport because of my great fear of falling on my head). Watching the superhuman feats of the Olympic athletes this week, I’ve admired the dedication and single-minded focus they exhibit. Rather, I’ve been thinking about the concept in general. No, not my job, nor my marriage nor the incredibly long Russian novel I need to read by September for my book group (check back with me on that later). I’VE been thinking about quitting lately.
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