Below, Lindsay Crouse shares five key insights from her new book, The Case for Quitting: The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out.

Lindsay is a marathon runner and journalist who worked at The New York Times for 15 years. Her reporting helped bring maternity rights to pregnant Nike athletes.

Quitting isn’t failure. Knowing when to walk away from a goal that no longer serves us can free up the time, energy, and opportunity we need to build something better.

Listen to the audio version of this Book Bite—read by Lindsay herself—in the Next Big Idea App, or buy the book.

Perseverance is essential. That’s why our culture holds it in such high regard. But misplaced perseverance backfires. It can lead us to push too hard against dead ends, pouring ourselves into futile goals we don’t actually have the power to achieve.

When we fail to quit, we waste precious resources—energy, money, time—on pursuits that make us increasingly miserable, even as we fall short of what we want. Focusing on the work keeps us from registering the mounting costs, or even recognizing that we’re failing at all.

I spoke to a woman who poured a decade of her life and thousands of dollars from her savings into fertility treatments, only to finally accept that they weren’t working. She quit, and began rebuilding the life she’d put on hold. A year later, she became pregnant naturally. Despite the promises of those interventions, her fertility goal had never been fully in her control.

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