‘quit’ is not a bad 4-letter word

Growing up I was told, “Quitters never win and winners never quit“. To quit was to be a failure. I carried this with me as a grew up. That was until one day all of my toenails fell out…don’t worry, I’ll explain.

I was about 15 years old and after training to be a lifeguard I hunted for a job. Too bad for me it was close to the end of summer and everyone had already hired their lifeguards for the season. But one person must have seen my despair-stricken face and taken pity on me because I was offered a Pool Maintenance job for a high-rise apartment building. Eh, close enough, I thought. Plus it paid pretty decent dime for a summer job. My first day was a blur. I was responsible for shocking the pool and backfilling, twisting and cranking the very large machine, located in a cool, dank room in the underground parking garage. The guy who showed me the ropes (who I can only assume hated the job since my training lasted a whopping 3 minutes), said something like this: “turn that wheel, then crank the bar, then let the water run out for 1 minute, then turn the wheel another 45 degrees, reverse crank the bar, push the button, make sure this is lit up, but not lit up blue (because that would be bad), add some powder here, but not too much powder, then blah, blah, blah. No written instructions, no demo, just a bunch of words hurled at a naive 15 year old girl.

Fast forward to my first real day on the job. I arrive at the apartment building and make my way to the bottom level of the parking garage. I open the heavy metal door to the maintenance room, it closes behind me and I tremble in front of the huge machine that makes the pool function. Somehow I remembered the instruction from the day before. I turned and cranked, as instructed, then suddenly the room went dark…power outage. Now if you remember the instructions, this is right around the time that the machine gushes out water. I now stood in a pitch black room in the basement of a high-rise with water rushing out of a huge electric machine. I panicked. I stumbled around trying to find the wall so I could feel my way back to the metal exit door. I tripped more times than I can count over the buckets brimming with chemicals and powders that lay strewn about the floor. Eventually I found the door, opened it and ran through the dark parking garage towards the stairs. I ran up as fast as my skinny legs would take me and found the superintendent who was busy answering angry calls from residents. “The…room is…uuuh…filling up…with…uh…water!”, I stammered. He looked at me like I was an annoying bug who had just landed on his sandwich. I thought he was going to squash me. “Stupid girl!” was his answer. He proceeded to bark at me to show him the room. We hopped down the steps two at a time to get to the room as quickly as possible. At some point the power came back on. We reached the door to the maintenance room, I opened it up and inside was a chemical soup about a foot deep and getting deeper by the minute.”Get in there and turn off the water!” he screamed at me. Ever the obedient girl, I waded through the foamy cesspool and turned off the flowing water. I don’t remember much of what happened next. What I do remember is taking a shower that evening and my toenails falling out one by one.

Needless to say, I quit that job and never looked back. I quit because I was disrespected, I quit because I was physically harmed, I quit because it wasn’t the job for me. I learned the lesson that sometimes quitting is necessary.

Quitting isn’t bad. But sometimes the intentions behind it are. If you’re quitting something because it’s too hard, you’re afraid, someone makes you quit for a reason you don’t believe in or because you don’t believe in yourself, you’re doing it for the wrong reason. But don’t be afraid to quit something that’s holding you back from being great at something else.