It has been a while since I posted. I have been doing a lot of writing in my day job and there just didn’t seem to be much left over for personal writing. But I have decided to take a sabbatical from regular work and I anticipate writing a lot more over the next year of so..

Change management is a very interesting topic. I’ve taken leadership courses focusing on change management. I have employed the techniques of motivational interviewing with thousands of patients. But in order to take a sabbatical, you have to break up with a lot of the regular commitments in your life. And the people who are involved in the regular commitments sometimes take that as a bit of a personal rejection.

I hate waste. With a passion.  So it was important to me to leave my current position as transparently and honestly as possible, with enough time that a plausible transition plan could be put in place. In order to achieve my goal of transferring as much of my work as possible in a usable state, I spent a fair amount of time emotionally regulating people’s response to my leaving. Most people wanted there to have been a very dramatic reason I was leaving, at least it seemed that way to me. The truth is much more prosaic and powerful – the future value of my job no longer outweighed the costs paid on a daily basis in performing my job duties.

If that sounds cold-blooded, it is. And as Annie Duke meticulously explores in her fabulous book Quit, it is not actually common human behaviour. Humans hate to quit when we are down. We have a tough time resisting the repeated gamble of repeatedly throwing dice that are loaded against us. Sure, some rolls may go your way, but typically if you’re wondering if you should quit something, there are about ten rolls that would have to go your way in order to make staying worth it.

So I’ll hope to share some of my life with you as a quitter, as well as explore persistence in service of my values.