Quitting is Absolutely Required if you want to Make Room for New Things

You won't have time or energy to do new things unless you clear out some old things. This applies to everything you do, such as work projects, hobbies, commitments to organizations and friendships. It's much like the stuff in your house. If you want to bring in new stuff for your house, you will need to give away or throw away some old stuff. If you fail to make room for new things, you will clog your house with too much stuff, making it unlivable, life-destroying.

That is the point of the following quote by Annie Duke, from her book, Quit: The Art of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022):

A common misconception about quitting is that it will slow your progress or stop it altogether. But it is the reverse that is actually true. If you stick to a path that is no longer worth pursuing, whether it’s a relationship that isn’t going well, or a stock that you’re invested in that’s losing money, or an employee that you’ve hired who isn’t performing, that is when you lose ground. By not quitting, you are missing out on the opportunity to switch to something that will create more progress toward your goals. Anytime you stay mired in a losing endeavor, that is when you are slowing your progress. Anytime you stick to something when there are better opportunities out there, that is when you are slowing your progress. Contrary to popular belief, quitting will get you to where you want to go faster.

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About Tyrannies

This is a passage from Will Storr's new book, The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It  (2022):

Tyrannies are virtue-dominance games. Much of their daily play and conversation will focus on matters of obedience, belief and enemies. Is the game you’re playing coercing people, both inside and outside it, into conforming to its rules and symbols? Does it attempt to silence its ideological foes? Does it tell a simplistic story that explains the hierarchy, deifying their group whilst demonising a common enemy? Are those around you obsessed with their sacred beliefs? Do they talk about them continually and with greedy pleasure, drawing significant status from belief and active belief? Does it seek to damage and destroy lives, often with glee? Is this aggression made to feel virtuous? That’s probably a tyranny. This might sound melodramatic, but we all contain the capacity for this dreadful mode of play: those cousins are built into our coding. If we’re serious about ‘never again’ we must accept that tyranny isn’t a ‘left’ thing or a ‘right’ thing, it’s a human thing. It doesn’t arrive goose-stepping down streets in terrifying ranks. It seduces us with stories.

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Self-Imploding Woke-Permeated Organizations

Can Woke people even get along with each other? Apparently not. Aaron Sibarium reports on "Women Against Abuse." 

"One of the largest domestic violence groups in the United States offered to pay "BIPOC" employees more than white ones; asked white staffers to sign a statement affirming their innate racism; and discouraged black abuse victims from calling the cops."

There are many more examples. Woke workplaces tend to destroy the ability to do meaningful work. A recent example is the meltdown at The Washington Post, featuring Felicia Sonmez. Here's what tends to happen when social justice warriors invade the workplace, as reported by Ricki Schlott.  And if you'd like a lot more example of woeness destroying morale, check out this article by Ryan Grimm at The Intercept:

ELEPHANT IN THE ZOOM: Meltdowns Have Brought Progressive Advocacy Groups to a Standstill at a Critical Moment in World History. Here is an excerpt:

A Prism reporter reached a widely respected Guttmacher board member, Pamela Merritt, a Black woman and a leading reproductive justice activist, while the Supreme Court oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization were going on last December, a year and a half after the Floyd meeting. She offered the most delicate rebuttal of the staff complaints possible.

“I have been in this movement space long enough to respect how people choose to describe their personal experience and validate that experience, even if I don’t necessarily agree that that’s what they experienced,” Merritt said. “It seems like there’s a conflation between not reaching the conclusion that people want and not doing due diligence on the allegations, which simply is not true.” Boonstra did not respond to a request to talk from either Prism or The Intercept.

The six months since then have only seen a ratcheting up of the tension, with more internal disputes spilling into public and amplified by a well-funded, anonymous operation called ReproJobs, whose Twitter and Instagram feeds have pounded away at the organization’s management. “If your reproductive justice organization isn’t Black and brown it’s white supremacy in heels co-opting a WOC movement,” blared a typical missive submitted to and republished on one of its Instagram stories. The news, in May 2022, that Roe v. Wade would almost certainly be overturned did nothing to temper the raging battle. (ReproJobs told The Intercept its current budget is around $275,000.)

That the institute has spent the course of the Biden administration paralyzed makes it typical of not just the abortion rights community — Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and other reproductive health organizations had similarly been locked in knock-down, drag-out fights between competing factions of their organizations, most often breaking down along staff-versus-management lines. It’s also true of the progressive advocacy space across the board, which has, more or less, effectively ceased to function. The Sierra Club, Demos, the American Civil Liberties Union, Color of Change, the Movement for Black Lives, Human Rights Campaign, Time’s Up, the Sunrise Movement, and many other organizations have seen wrenching and debilitating turmoil in the past couple years.

In fact, it’s hard to find a Washington-based progressive organization that hasn’t been in tumult, or isn’t currently in tumult. It even reached the National Audubon Society . . .

[More . . . ]

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