Never Giving Up Can Hold You Back | Lindsay Crouse

Michael Easter (0:00)

You ever have days where you just want to quit at all your job, completely delete your email, maybe drop your kids off at kindergarten and not pick them up for like two weeks? I think we all do. Now, you might be thinking that this is going to be an episode about why you should persist. After all, I did write The Comfort Crisis. But in fact, we're bringing on an expert in quitting, and she's going to talk to you about when quitting is actually a pretty good idea. So we'll get into it right now.

All right. Well, Lindsay Crouse, you are a former New York Times writer, editor, producer, lifelong competitive distance runner. I liked hearing that. You're the author of the new book, The Case for Quitting, The Surprising Benefits of Opting Out. So we're going to talk all about quitting. We'll talk about when it's a good idea, when it's a bad idea, the psychology of persistence versus capping out and a lot more. But here's where I want to start. You have the section of the book that I think aligns a little bit with my own work and it was enlightening. Let's start with this finish, as in the country, concept of CSU.

What is it? And I think I pronounced it right. Maybe I didn't. Tell us about it, though.

Lindsay Crouse (1:12)

Yeah, I think none of us can quite pronounce it right. But CSU is the ability to push through really hard things, especially when things are difficult. And I mean, Finland, if you look at the World Happiness Report, year after year, it lands at the top of the list. It's one of the happiest, as the happiest country in the world. And a lot of Finns really credit their national character to this quality of CSU, this ability that you could really just think of as resilience, right?

And so that's what I found really fascinating in writing this book, is that CSU is in some ways an analogy for perseverance. And obviously perseverance is essential. That's why so many societies, including Finland, holds it in such high regard. But then there are these psychologists, Finnish psychologists, that have kind of identified that there is good CSU and then there's bad CSU. And misplaced perseverance, it backfires. It can lead us to push too hard against dead ends. It can lead us to pour ourselves into futile goals that we lack control to achieve. And it can hold us back. So that's CSU in a nutshell for Finland and the rest of us.

Michael Easter (2:25)

So it may have benefited the Finns in terms of their happiness, just because they're like, we've weathered a lot of metaphorical storms and we've come out on the other side and it's kind of given us this perspective. Where in that Finnish research did you find that it actually had some downsides?

Lindsay Crouse (2:45)

Sure, it's this idea that, I think this is a really interesting analogy in Finland about how CSU will get you to push through the boulder. It will get you through granite, meaning that you have this wall in front of you. You are going to push through the wall until you get to the other side.

But then there's this other analogy where it's like, well, you could just go around the boulder and there's an easier way where you're not pouring all your energy, where you're actually saving your energy for a battle worth fighting. You don't always have to go through the granite. You can go around it and still get to the other side.

Michael Easter (3:23)

Yeah. You had a really amazing stat that was something like 30,000 years of human history. You look at all these civilizations, the ones who have experienced droughts, wars, floods, all this crazy stuff, they tend to become more resilient over time.

At the same time, this is a life or death circumstance. It's like if you don't push through the granite, you're going to die. So you do it and you learn something from that. But what it sounds like you're saying, and I would say this aligns with my own work, is that when you're doing something challenging, there needs to be a positive end goal.

Like if the end goal isn't going to benefit you in the long run, the case for persistence all of a sudden starts to fall apart because, yeah, if you do win, well, you get this thing that maybe you didn't even want in the long run and isn't going to benefit you in the long run. So how do you think about making sure that you're doing the thing and persisting in a way that is actually going to help you in the long run? How do you even identify, is this a good thing for me long haul?