I was walking down my street today when I saw – as I often do – several discarded books lined up outside of an apartment building for the taking. The one that stuck out at me today was an old paper back of Russell Baker’s book The Good Times.

I remember Russell Baker because we had to read his memoir Growing Up for summer reading the year before AP English (along with James Michener’s The Fires of Spring, the juxtaposition of Baker’s economical prose and Michener’s famously overdone prose made my mother say, “Oh, I see what he’s doing. I think I like this teacher.”)

I just opened the book up and read in the first paragraph, a line of dialogue from Baker’s mother. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s a quitter.” I opened the book up after getting this post’s suggestion.

The word quit makes me think of my father because he, while never stating it as plainly as Baker’s mother, also hated quitters. If you start something, you finish it, end of story. It’s on your honor to do the things that you say you’re going to do.

It also makes me think of the job that I quit in 2014. I was working at a place called HNW as a web developer. My immediate boss was a guy named Anthony who was an amazing developer. He just knew everything. No matter what you were working on, if you had a problem, he had a solution. You encounter people like that in the dev world.

And around that time, though, the fortunes of the company were changing and everyone was leaving. Anthony left the company and revealed just how much the department leaned on him. I also had to start dealing more directly with his boss Peter, who knew nothing. Peter was a project manager who didn’t know how to code and yet. A fellow developer and I theorized that his real talent was passing blame on to others in order to justify his own job. You encounter bosses like that in the dev world.

By then I had been working for a decade and a half and I had only ever left a job once and that was to go to another job. I had savings and no other job to go to. I thought how often are you going to quit a job? So, I did it. It felt pretty good to give notice to Peter.

I went out for goodbye drinks that night and very few people came. One guy I barely spoke to came because he know a VP would throw down a corporate card. A woman named Sue did and the next day she sent me an email asking if I could send her some money for the bill. A few months later, the company closed. I think I made the right decision.

It’s rare that I quit anything but I do think that it’s a skill, knowing when to stop. Really, it’s taking stock of your life. Is this job, this activity, this friendship, this relationship, this career, this pursuit still what I want? It can be a confusing question to ask when you’re perpetually unclear on what it is you want.

The word quit also makes me think of quitting smoking, which I did again for, hopefully, the final time last April. On the 19th, it’ll be five months. I’m back to the place of wondering why the hell people do that to themselves. It’s a good place to be.