Me on El Hierro, September 20th 2016
with one of its 500 volcanoes in the background
Those of you who read my earlier posts, probably know that I'm a filmmaker. Until a week ago, I was working on the biggest and most difficult project of my life. It was a Spanish feature film, to be shot on one of the Canary Islands, El Hierro.
A week ago, the film got cancelled. It was a decision of me and the guy with whom I had been working on it from the get go, October last year. It wasn't an easy decision, to say the least.
Failure or Learning Experience
Instead of looking back at the process and project as a failure, I am going to do the opposite. I will look at it as a learning experience. A very valuable one.
The day after the project got aborted, I spoke to my parents on the phone. I asked both my mom and dad to listen to me, as this felt like an important thing to share with them.
I broke them the news that I had quit the project I had been working on for the last nine months. My father's immediate response was as follows:
"When are you ever going to finish something?"
That felt kind of like a punch below the belt and I told him that. I also felt like explaining to him that quitting something isn't necessarily a bad thing. Especially if you're stuck and - no matter how much you try to change things - it just isn't working.
The conversation eventually turned into one of the best chats with my parents in a long time, which is a good thing. Nevertheless, I couldn't help analyzing it afterwards. What stuck with me the most was that one little sentence my father had uttered. "When are you ever going to finish something?" I wondered if he actually had a point and tried to postion myself in his shoes. I then made a mental list of all the big things that I had finished and the big things that I hadn't. For the sake of this argument, I will focus on the stuff that I completed. I soon realized that what I had finished was:
- primary school
- high school
- university.
To be precise, I had spent 21 years - 1986 to 2007 - being schooled / studying. Why had I done that? Mainly because I felt I had no choice and it was what other people - read: my parents - expected from me. Sure, in The Netherlands you are supposed to go to school until you are 16, but I topped that with almost 10 years.
Time to make my own choices
When I finally finished university and wasn't able to find a job fitting my degree, background or passion, I pledged to myself that from that moment onwards I would try to do what actually felt good as much as possible. That in itself made me quit plenty of times or - if I didn't quit soon enough - got me fired.
The fact that I quit more jobs and projects over the last couple of years than I might have done in the past isn't a sign of weakness. It doesn't mean that I'm failing more often. It just tells me that I'm better at saying "no", better at saying "enough!" and better at following my gut feeling.
No Regrets
So, do I regret the last couple of years? Not at all! I learned to quit. The next step might be to actually quit earlier, before too much damage is done.
Final words of wisdom:
Don't feel bad for not finishing something that doesn't feel right. Learn to master the power of quitting.
What do you think? Is quitting a weakness? How good are you at quitting? What was the last time you quit something big and what was it?
Follow your own path. You will get there eventually