Never Quit on a Bad Day

If you are going to quit, quit on a good day.

A bad day makes a poor witness. It can testify to the friction: the short sleep, the wasted hour, the weather that turned on you at ten o’clock. About the work itself it knows very little, because through that lens every life looks like the wrong one.

So wait. Hold the decision until the work goes well and the wish to leave survives it. If you finish a day where everything ran clean and you still want out, you can trust the exit. A mood was never going to make that call honestly on your behalf.

The rule extends past jobs. A book you keep abandoning, a discipline, a plan you’ve held for years: judge them on their good days and you’ll learn what you actually think of them. Judge them on their worst and you’ll only learn what tired feels like.

Staying through a bad stretch costs something, and I pay it on purpose. The exit I get in return is certain, and I never have to wonder whether I left a good thing over a hard week.