Due to my desire to overturn my false conviction that I ‘was’ a quitter I often ended up ignoring my intuition and as a consequence stuck with some things far longer than I ever would do if I had my time over again. The list of errors runs long and deep and they have had a major impact on my life.

Education: As a young teenager I had both artistic ability and scientific ability. I liked to combine the two and to think of inventions and to come up with product designs. I wanted to become a designer of products. Primarily out of ignorance and poor advice (but also out of idle fantasising) I chose the wrong kind of subject to study at university. After a semester I could see that it really didn’t interest me and that it also did not suit my abilities. I wanted to quit but my family set themselves dead against this. I didn’t have the maturity or resources to take responsibility for myself and act independently so I continued. In the second semester I experienced a long depression and skipped many classes. I got to the verge of getting kicked out but decided in the third semester to make amends and studied with great dedication and passed the year.

I continued into the second year and gained a diploma (I had enrolled on a Higher National Diploma course and not on a Bachelor Degree). I decided to continue studying and to enter onto a degree course and changed to a different university. My diploma allowed me to enrol in the second year of the degree course but I found that it mostly repeated what I had already done in the second year of my diploma course and that the new topics left me horrified with the absolute tedium and boredom of the subjects. This time after one semester I quit and decided to get a job as several of my friends from the diploma course now worked for Rolls-Royce in gas turbine manufacture and they all seemed to have a high old time.

Employment: I found employment with RR as a graduate trainee and entered onto their programme. I had decided that I wanted to go into design and talked about this at the interview and received the response that I could do this. The initial programme included 3-months of basic workshop training and then 3-months on a design and make project, plus other short courses. Afterwards we went into the company on 3-monthly assignments with different departments. At this time I heard the news that people with my qualification could no longer become designers. Instead they first had to become draughtsmen and then, after several years, could later become designers. As an impatient, haughty and petulant young man I found this unacceptable and went into a different department. My ideas of becoming any kind of designer came to an end here. With hindsight I would have done better to quit at this point and to have found another way to become a designer but I still rankled with the label of ‘quitter’ and so my pride and my lack of confidence meant that I stuck with it.

I left after three years at RR and went off to travel and work abroad. I had some great experiences as an English teacher in Bangkok and as a gold miner in Australia but I ended up returning to the UK and went back to what I knew – working in engineering.

I applied for, and got, a job with another gas turbine company. At the interview we talked only of my past experience and so I assumed that I would do more the same (test engineering). Then at the interview they told me about the pay and benefits and about the bonus scheme and so on. I took the job because the pay seemed okay and I could do more test engineering. However in the first week of the job I ended up doing preparation work for piping schemes, something that I new nothing about. I found out that no test facilities existed and that I had become a member of the team that would design and build the new facilities. I wanted to complain but my arrival coincided with the disappearance of my boss on holiday for two weeks. On his return my boss gave a good sell on our undertaking and how useful it would prove to me to become a project engineer and later a test engineer. I kept going and stuck it out not really taking on board that involuntarily I had now changed career into project management.

Later that first month came much excitement at the plant. The bonus scheme had changed and had become a permanent addition to the basic salary (Hurray!) except for people that started after April 1^st (Bollocks! Me!). I felt duped because I had taken the probable bonus into account and salaries for young engineers at that time didn’t pay well. I should certainly have complained but I didn’t know that I could do that so I just put my head down and stuck it out. At that point I should have left since pay and career had changed from that alluded to at the interview.

After two years I left and did my own thing for a year and a half.

I later needed a job again and through my old boss got recommended for a position in Switzerland. I took the job but again found that the interviewer (my future boss) had strongly misrepresented the job and that the human resources interviewer told me wrong information about what kind of visa my wife would have eligibility for. Within the first two weeks I realised that the job did not meet my expectations of what I thought we had talked about at the interview and I felt awful about it but I had no place to return to in England and decided to stick it out when I should have quit. I had many troubles with the job, my boss, and consequently with my (now ex-) wife.

After two years I left and did my own thing for a couple of years.

I later needed a job again and after several months of searching got a position with a new company as a project manager. The pay just about sufficed and I had other things that I intended to do to earn a bit extra. I had separated from my ex-wife and now had another woman in my life who, I must say, demanded a lot of me. After one week in the job I felt astounded that the project I had responsibility for and which counted as the second largest in the company and had a very prestigious customer, had had no project management applied to it. Although four years into the project, I had no information to do my management with. I had no plans, no structures, nothing. Everything lay in the heads of the people involved. I soon found that the project had disaster written all over it. Some people in the project team worked 60-hours and more a week on the thing and it seemed that I would have to change my expectations of a 37-hour working week to put in similar amounts of hours (thus diluting my salary to a ridiculously low hourly rate and foregoing any opportunities to coin it in doing things outside of work). I naturally had very grave doubts about the job. In the second week I found myself, and key productive people in my team, getting pulled into management meetings about general management issues. It soon became clear that the project I worked on had ended up in such a mess because the whole company had very poor management. I had an introduction to the director of the division who gave me no good feelings at all (and whose only qualifications for the position that I could discern were that he was very tall and had good hair).

Finally this time I listened to my intuition. Disaster clearly lay ahead with the project, the job, my personal life, and my finances. Despite having no home to go to and no job prospects and knowing that it would end my relationship with my girlfriend, I quit.

I spent a week doing little except to think over my situation. I made a list of things that I wanted in a job and things I would not accept. The next week on the Monday I sent my CV into an agency that specialised in my field. On the Wednesday I had a telephone interview for a job that ticked all of the boxes on my list and on the Friday I received the job offer. It made for the quickest job hunt that I have ever had and it made for one of the best jobs that I have ever had. I cannot account for this piece of luck except that I like to think that by learning from my mistakes of the past and deciding to act differently (something that required a lot of courage from me at that time) then whatever form of providence exists decided to reward me big time. In fact whenever I face down my fears and live courageously (not recklessly or foolishly, mind you) then life just gets better for me and the painful problem that kept repeating for me on that particular issue just vanishes.

After a year and a half in my last job I moved onto a new project but from the start it felt bad. I didn’t like the structure of it, had no confidence in the competence of the senior management team and the method and timeliness of how they made decisions. Plus I ended up dealing with people that clearly would prove problematical for the entire duration of the project. Since I had little control over these factors and success would depend more upon dumb luck than management ability I decided not to struggle against it all just for the money and so I quit.

In the above I have given you a detailed synopsis of my education and career and how dumb persistence led to personal difficulty and sometimes disaster. I have come to the conclusion that when I find myself in a situation where I can control few factors that if it starts out badly then it will continue to go badly. This applies to relationships as well as to jobs. Certain things just don’t change easily such as big ventures or enterprises, long established and highly structured systems and also most people. In general, these types of things have very little margin for adjustment from how you first encounter them. Whilst I wholly agree with the idea that we can change our interpretations of events to cope with difficulties I also think that if we can intelligently avoid having to do that by selecting an education, career, company, country, city, neighbourhood, friends and lovers with no less than 80% (and preferably closer to 95%) of the right fit from the beginning then that proves the much wiser course to take.

I advocate putting a lot of effort into searching and finding external circumstances that provide the best possibility and probability of living well. I create very clear specifications and know in detail what I want and find acceptable what I don’t want and find unacceptable. By thinking things through and by paying good attention to detail we can eliminate many potential problems right from the outset. After that it becomes necessary to adjust thinking and attitudes internally to accept the things that don’t totally meet our desires. We end up in a continuous balancing act between changing ourselves to accept and fit in with reality and yet sometimes refusing to fit that particular reality and refusing to change ourselves because to do so will diminish us or corrupt our inner nature.

The judgement depends on what factors you can control and want to control. For example, as a young man I often changed jobs, cities, countries, girlfriends and friends. I found satisfaction with very little and so I kept on changing things on the outside hoping to stumble across the good life. After doing this many times I began to realise that I came across the same problems wherever I ended up and with whomever I ended up. I had the good sense to realise that perhaps I needed to change myself, my attitude and my interpretation of things and not the outside world. As I came to change my perceptions and to change my thinking then my real world changed. I took fully on board the principles described by Stephen Covey in the book ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People’ about personal responsibility and how I alone must take responsibility for my situation. Even if sometimes I did not cause a problem the responsibility always remained with me to find ways to prevent that problem from occurring again. Thus if ended up in situations that did not satisfy me then I changed my methods and my thinking to make things work better from then on.

In the end though, I probably took this approach too far to the extreme. This level of accepting responsibility only works for things over which we have personal control. I caused trouble for myself by taking on responsibility for other people’s problems that I could not control. I wore myself down by attempting to control the impossible to control. Also, in order to co-exist with certain people and in line with accepting that sometimes I must change; I changed some of my personal standards and lowered them. Whilst this initially allowed me to accept what previously I had found unacceptable and thus reduced friction in the end it created many other problems. In lowering my standards I stopped handling my life as well as I had done and this created more deep seated problems. In the end I felt bad about myself for giving up previous gains and living to a lower standard that actually made life more difficult. I chose to raise my standards again and moved on from those people with whom I could no longer co-exist with.

Now I make a distinction between recognising what things I have a large element of control over (my reactions, my perceptions, my rules, my feelings, which friends to have, what woman to continue dating with, what job to take, etc) and those things that I don’t have much control over (colleagues, company management, the weather, national legislation, etc). Consequently if I get involved in something over which I have very little control and which starts out bad or experiences major changes and subsequently goes bad, and for which and for whatever reasons I choose not to accommodate myself to, then I get out quickly. I might stay longer if I have a strong need for income or some other factor, in which case I temporarily accommodate myself to the situation, or if I feel that I have a strong probability to control future possibilities and can use it as a short-term stepping stone (e.g. a foot in the door at a company before changing departments, projects, divisions etc).

The same goes with most people. The people we meet generally will not change very much. Wishing and hoping for different behaviour will not work. Change will only occur within in another person if they recognise that they have a problem and want to change. With someone like that and with the right approach then beneficial, permanent change can occur, otherwise forget it. Accept the people that you meet as the complete deal there and then and don’t expect, hope or wish for them to change, unless they actively submit to changing by themselves. In order to get along with them you might have to change your own rules, standards and perceptions otherwise get away from them or expect not to rub along well.

A lot of people hold the ability to compromise in high-esteem but for me the concept of compromise never enters my thinking or decision process. I seek solutions and usually options for solutions exist. I take a practical approach and select the solution that best suits me. Sometimes that means that I have to change my perceptions, my standards, or my rules in order to accept and apply the solution. The concept of compromise suggests accepting something that you don’t really want and of ‘losing out’. This will likely lead to resentment of the other party or yourself, which means long-lasting dissatisfaction and even if mild that will bug you continuously and surface as some other symptom of trouble later on. Through fully accepting the solution available and through accepting responsibility for the consequences of that acceptance I never end up compromised. I accept the reality of things now and continuously seek to create a better reality wherever I can.

Our culture places a lot of value on persisting and we see quitting as a very bad thing. Sometimes we must persist with difficult things in order to get multiple benefits. Few of us would get far in life if we didn’t persist with difficult things such as learning to read and write. Plus, sometimes hanging on in there can sometimes make good on things but in my experience, not very often. If we get clever in knowing what we want, design a good process for how to get it and then seek to create those conditions as far as we can from the beginning then we almost never need to hang on in there with hope as our mainstay of support. I laboured for years persisting on things that really did not agree with me and through which I suffered – pretty mild suffering in the grand scheme of things but on a relative basis it felt continuously bad to me and at times it really did grind me down. I advocate persisting with things that you really want to see, make, do or have. I do not advocate persisting just because quitting seems like a bad thing to do. Whilst I learnt some things from the experience of persisting for the sake of persisting I really did not need to repeat the experience continually for years on end. Only when I stopped doing that did my life suddenly improve.

Get clear about what you want and seek out those things and those conditions. If you put yourself into a situation where 80% to 100% of everything either suits you or satisfies you from the beginning then you will prosper. If you get into a situation, relationship or whatever where far too much doesn’t fit then get out of it as soon as you can. I don’t mean to give licence to aimless wandering and quitting as soon as things get tough. I never recommend that. That can continuously happen though if you don’t get very clear about what you want, if you don’t design a good process for making it happen, if you don’t consider what personal and external resources you require, if you don’t consider what challenges you will face and how you will deal with them and if you don’t consider what level of commitment you will need to make those things happen. People who get very clear about what they want and how to get it and approach such development very pragmatically and thoroughly, i.e. no wishful thinking or reliance upon ‘striking it lucky’, will by and large get a large measure of what they set out to gain.