Give Up, You Might Learn Something about Yourself
In this post, Mario I. Juarez-Garcia (Tulane University) discusses his article recently published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy on the unexplored value of giving up.
A World of Constant Failure
We all fail. Our papers get rejected, we do not get the job, we declare bankruptcy, we divorce. These are some of the numerous failures that force us to revisit our decisions, abandon our hopes, and find new horizons. And yet, most of the stories around us tell us that we should never surrender, never give up, keep trying. What does not kill us makes us stronger, right? It seems as if failure has no value. When we cannot avoid it, we should move on and hide it. Against common wisdom, my article “Giving Up” (published in the Journal of Applied Philosophy) stresses the importance of failing and giving up.
The Value of Giving Up
Moral philosophers have emphasized the value of perseverance, but not many have addressed the importance of giving up. Perseverance is risky without openness to failing and giving up first. This is easy to understand when we consider two moments of the pursuit of goals: exploration and exploitation. If we only exploit (i.e., we pursue) the first goal we choose, we might either succeed but be ultimately dissatisfied with the result and feel the need to try something else (I call this the risk of success), or we might persevere in goals that we are simply not fit to achieve (the risk of failure), just for the sake of avoiding failure. To avoid these situations, we must explore our goals first, until finding the one that is suitable for us. And the openness to giving up is fundamental for a fruitful exploration.
How do we know which goals are suitable for us? Building on Saras Sarasvathy’s wonderful paper on “Causation and Effectuation: Toward a Theoretical Shift from Economic Inevitability to Entrepreneurial Contingency”, I argue that the exploration of our goals is parallel to the exploration of our means. When we fail, we learn something about ourselves, our skills, our attitudes, our situation, that would not have been available otherwise. When we are attentive to our effort and to our context, we might learn that we are not suitable for some goals. I joined a band when I was a teenager, but soon realized that I was not a great songwriter, for example. I tried working an office job at some point in my life, but I realized that what I wanted was to do philosophy, so I quit. Exploring goals is exploring ourselves. In this framework, giving up is just knowing that we do not have what it takes to succeed. And that is nothing to be ashamed of. That is an important moment of a process of exploration that might ultimately lead us to understand our talents and skills, as well as to identify the goal that we should strive for.
The Story Behind Giving Up
This is a personal paper. Its story illustrates the argument, even if, at first glance, ironically. I wrote it when I was in graduate school as a side project. We were in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and I was sure I was not going to get an academic job. All my colleagues had better CVs, better publications, and better prospects than me. And the pandemic was going to create a bottleneck in the job market. I did not stand a chance. I came to terms with the idea and told myself that I could be happy as a high school teacher. I preemptively gave up on my academic career and decided to use the rest of my time in the program to write about topics that I cared about. So I wrote the first draft of this paper as a side project. When my advisor, David Schmidtz, read it, he told me to take this essay seriously.
I sent the draft to friends in the program. Due to their positive feedback, I submitted it with high hopes, but received rejection after rejection. The paper often passed the editor, but referees wrote that the paper could be better, that it was not quite there yet. After a few rejections, I started to think: should I give up on this paper? Maybe I should listen to my own advice. But, something else happened. I noticed that everyone who read it shared a personal story of failure: they quit their music career, they faced family problems, they questioned whether to pursue a philosophical career, etc. I cherished those stories. I have never had a paper that prompted people to open their hearts. This was an unmistakable signal of the value of this essay. I just needed to find the right way to express it.
The referees were right. In some sense, I gave up on this paper. Probably two or three paragraphs survived from the first version. The argument, the structure, and the writing changed. I significantly nuanced my claims. I went from an unapologetic invitation to give up and an antagonistic stance toward those who promote perseverance to a view that assigns giving up and grit a place in the process of exploring and exploiting goals. The younger version of me was wrong: I did not need to be antagonistic, I needed to be honest. Yet, I did not give up on the main takeaway: giving up is a step toward self-knowledge, if we know how to understand its lessons.
This published version is better than any other thanks to all the ideas that I gave up in the process. Despite the title of this essay, the main topic is not failure, but success in a goal that is chosen after careful reflection resulting from experiencing failures. The kind of success that we can be sure is the right one, not the one that we were told to achieve. When we consider the process of exploration as fundamental for choosing the right goal to exploit, we know that what does not make us stronger may not kill us either.
Mario I. Juarez-Garcia is Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Political Economy at Tulane University. He is a faculty member at the Murphy Institute of Political Economy and a fellow at the Research Center for Corruption Studies of the University of Geneva. His research focuses mainly on political corruption and the administrative state.
