Dear Mr. President, It’s OK to Quit

In partnership with

As someone who’s written a lot about a lot of things over many, many years, I’ve been a little reluctant to reuse any of my old material for Trying! But the events of today call out for a slightly edited rehash of this piece I wrote for Medium in early 2017. Please enjoy! And please note our sponsor, Authory, whose story-archiving system I am an enthusiastic user of. For each of you who clicks that link, I get $2.

Also: Don’t forget to fill out the survey! I want to know what to do in the next iteration of this thing.

Early in the fall of 2014, I took a new job in a city a few hours from New York. It was an ambitious one, at the head of an organization larger than I’d ever dealt with before, but I was confident I could tackle the challenge. I had vision. I had skills. And I was being given an opportunity to demonstrate my expertise as a turnaround artist.

It was, I knew, not going to be easy. There were structures and traditions in place that I knew were going to have to change, or maybe even get scrapped entirely. There were going to be people on my side, people opposing me, and people who were just there for whatever reason, without much at stake in what direction things moved. Above all, there were problems to solve, and I was going to be the one to solve them.

There was just one, uh, problem with all of this: Almost from the beginning, I was miserable. The structural and strategic problems I’d been so eager to solve suddenly turned knotty and intractable, and the power I believed I’d have to cut through them simply wasn’t there. The true believers were great to work with, but the very existence of the naysayers discouraged me. Why couldn’t they see that if I succeeded we’d all succeed? I began to dread going in to the office, and my vision blurred.

Until one day, two months in, I saw a crystalline window into a future where I’d be happy — a future where I didn’t have this job any more. The very next day, I quit.

🪨

Start 2025 with a new, auto-updating portfolio

A new year is the perfect time for a fresh start. Authory helps you hit the ground running with a portfolio that updates itself every time you publish an article, no matter where.

No more tedious updates or worrying about losing your work due to site shutdowns.

Show off your writing with confidence, knowing everything is backed up and ready to share.

Make 2025 the year you automate your workflow, and shine as a writer.

Get started with your free portfolio today

🪨

The decision, of course, filled me with shame. I’d had grand ambitions and had quickly failed to make them a reality. I’d let down those who had believed in me and, more important, in my vision. We all still wanted it to happen, but now, if it ever did, I would not be a part of it. How, I wondered, would I ever recover from this?

But almost as soon as I left, the reassurances came in. It was better, people said, that I’d left early, rather than sticking around six months or a year, when my departure would have made life that much more difficult for everyone. It was good, people said, that I was putting my family’s happiness and my mental health first; jobs come and go, but not so family. And you know what? I was happier! Let some other schmo, with less at stake or more determination, fight this system. I would have other, better, more satisfying battles to fight.

So, I quit. It sucked. But it was, in the end, a more honorable and fair move to make than sticking it out to the detriment of myself and all around me. Everyone in the world is better for it.

Just sayin’,

— Matt

P.S. For all the gory details, just google.

🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: The Sense of an Ending

Back when I was in college, Julian Barnes came to teach creative writing for a year. My strongest memory of him was his complaint that I (and possibly others in our fiction workshop) wrote too often about Taco Bell. For a long time, I refused to read him because of that, but that was stupid, because the man is a master, and this novel, though its story starts off seeming so normal, builds to a gut-punch that is unequalled in 21st-century fiction. Read it in a single session, then eat your chalupa and think deeply about it.

Read Yesterday’s Attempt