Quit, or Don’t, No One But You Can Decide

Sweet Bites for January 24, 2025

Hi all,

Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.

This email forwarded? Want full email? Update your subscription below.

Any of the below bites resonate? Hit the reply button and let me know.

---

📝 Quick Poll

🍰 Mini Bite

When many people think of Thomas Edison, they immediately jump to the invention of the lightbulb which revolutionized the way we live. But long before Edison had found success, he was a young inventor looking to build the next great invention.

Many of the inventions Edison created, especially in his youth, people have never heard of, one of them being the automatic vote recorder.

Designed for the politicians of his day, the vote recorder would allow an individual to cast their vote for a bill and have it automatically tallied by the machine, thus saving tons of time for everyone by automating the vote tallying process.

“I thought my fortune was made,” he would reflect.

There was only one problem with Edison’s invention: no one asked for it.

When Edison proudly brought the device to Washington for demonstration, it was immediately panned by politicians.

Many viewed Edison’s machine as cutting off key components of the politicians’ job such as negotiating and vote trading.

Edison learned the lesson many businesses of today still do not know: before inventing, you must understand what the customer’s wants and needs are.

Edison didn’t allow this to get him down, however. In fact, this experience helped shape the rest of Edison’s life and how he approached inventing.

As one biographer would write, “He vowed he would not invent a technology that didn’t have an apparent market; that he wasn’t just going to invent things for the sake of inventing them but…to be able to sell them.”

Grit is built from passion and perseverance, but it can’t be blind. Persevering just for the sake of it won’t get you to where you want to be. Having passion but no plan of action also won’t.

Having grit is about combining your passion with perseverance, and learning from the experiences you encounter.

The paths we pursue are constantly shifting as we learn to navigate them in the pursuits of our desires. It is critical to keep an open mind and see what challenges are teaching us. It is only through learning from these setbacks do we truly learn how to succeed.

As Edison said, “I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.”

🧘🏻This Week’s Monday Meditation

🦉 This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom

📹 Short Video on Grit

In this video, Andrew Huberman breaks down a study on grit that showed higher brain activity in the anterior mid-cingulate cortex for those showing grit. Huberman breaks down grit and the brain imaging studies that showcased the activation.

📚 Wisdom

“There's a fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness. Sometimes the best kind of grit is gritting our teeth and turning around.”

Adam Grant
Source: Think Again

💭 Reflection for the Weekend

The below discusses the movie Brittany Runs a Marathon and contains some spoilers.

The film, Brittany Runs a Marathon, centers on the protagonist Brittany who, living an unhealthy lifestyle, is told she needs to get her life in order and get in shape.

Not being able to afford a gym membership, Brittany begins running. As she progresses throughout the film and finds victories in her improvement, she sets a goal of running a marathon.

But with just a few weeks of training left before the big day, Brittany suffers a stress fracture in her shin. The “dark night of the soul” moment arrives after the doctor advises her she needs to stay off it for several months in order for it to heal.

With the devastating news, Brittany decides to quit running, a throw the baby out with the bath water moment, and her life returns to the way it was before she ever embarked on her journey.

She once again is unhappy with her life, with her friends, and with herself. The progress toward transformation has all but stopped and she’s begun backsliding.

Like all movies, this is the moment where the protagonist must make a decision: they either return to their old life untransformed and resume how it previously was, or they must find a way to get back up and go pursue what they wanted, which ultimately leads to their transformation.

The moment is vital because it is the moment we all fall prey to when we meet a hard stop in our pursuits. When these moments strike our natural reaction is to question the quest we’re on and feel doubt about why we’re pursuing it in the first place.

This attitude often leads us to return to our normal state of being, before we began our transformation, before the journey.

But this moment is the crossroad we all will face one way or another, and only the individual in it can decide which direction to go in. Do we get back up and fight on? Or do we quit?

Sometimes the right answer for the individual is to quit. Other times it is to continue on.

Brittany does end up running a marathon because while she quit temporarily, she didn’t give up, she came to terms with the fact she would rest, and once recovered, train again and run her marathon.

This is a key distinction.

She quit running temporarily in order to heal, but she didn’t give up on her goal of running the marathon and that’s exactly what she does once she heals.

Like the Edison story above, sometimes we need to adjust how we’re approaching a goal in order to truly achieve it.

We’re told quitting is bad, it’s not persevering, it’s not grinding it out and being resilient. But no one else is in our shoes but us. No one else writes our story, or knows our journey, or dictates our goals except for us. Sometimes quitting is right and sometimes it’s not.

Only the individual writing their story can decide which path to take.

🎥 Video Worth a Watch

Angela Duckworth, who is known for her book Grit and her research diving into the topic, presents what grit is and how we can utilize it.

Think someone you know would enjoy these? Hit below to forward and spread the love.

Until next time,

D.A. DiGerolamo

We are a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.