Quitting Is a Skill, Not a Shame

How I benefited from it over 14 years as a content creator and solopreneur.

Oct 23, 2024

🤩 Hey! I’m Alberto. With my newsletter I want to help you reach your full potential and live your ideal life with a content-based business. I’ve been doing this since 2010.
I talk about productivity, automation, strategy and mindset.

I recently celebrated 14 years since my first blog post went live. Looking back, I realize my creator story is one of quitting and pivoting.

I've had to change course many times, often dramatically. I realized that changing direction is inevitable for every creator and solopreneur.

But even though it’s common, it doesn’t mean it’s easy.

I distilled my experience in this article: what it looks like when you have to quit or pivot, how to make it easier, how to benefit from it. I hope it helps you when you’re stuck wondering “Should I keep going or should I change course?”

Consistency isn't enough

Some people share criminally oversimplified posts that sound like "Keep going, good things will come." That's not true.

Consistency is necessary, but not sufficient. (Excuse the mathematical language, I have to show off my PhD once in a while 😉)

In other words, if you're not consistent, you'll probably fail. But being consistent doesn't guarantee success. You have to do much more.

Take my current Italian project, for example. It started as a podcast. We were the first in Italy to interview digital entrepreneurs.

We quickly gained devoted fans, so we kept going, but we hit a plateau. Our monthly downloads weren't growing. Neither did our email list.

To top it off, many of those raving fans were just there for entertainment and inspiration but didn't buy our courses or services.

We thought we could find a fix and kept going for years, changing frequency, format, and questions. But we couldn't break through the ceiling.

Consistency was pointless. Things improved (a lot) only when we quit the podcast and started a YouTube channel.

The burden of sunk cost

Sunk cost bias is a disappointingly common flaw in human thinking.

Imagine you've been publishing for years on a platform and built a decent audience. At some point, traffic slows down, and engagement plummets. Your results don’t justify your immense effort anymore.

Meanwhile, a new platform emerges, and everyone there is raving about easy and fast growth. But you can't leave the old platform. It seems like a waste—all those years, all those hours creating content.

This is sunk cost bias. It pushes us to pour more effort into a losing game just because we did it in the past. But now the effort is wasted because it's not bringing the results we want anymore. We should invest elsewhere and get rewarded.

For a few years, my photography blog got lots of views, made me well-known, and helped me sell my products and affiliate products. But then photographers started using Instagram and YouTube, and I got more involved in other projects.

So earnings and views slowed down. I kept going for years, thinking “If I just did this or that, maybe earnings will grow again”. But I never found the time. I finally sold the site in 2023, at least three years too late.

I still feel a twinge of regret when I think about it. It was my baby, my first entrepreneurial success! But I can’t deny the benefits.

What do you gain from quitting and pivoting?

I consider drastic changes only when things aren’t going as I’d hoped. Obvious, right?

This means that I am not in a good mental space:

I am tired of trying everything without succeeding,
I don’t have spare time because I am spending everything to make things work,
I am afraid of trying something new that could also fail.

As a consequence, indecision consumes me.

This leads to an inevitable benefit of quitting or pivoting: you turn off indecision. You stop endless “what if” loops. You start acting in a new direction. And new beginning are always exciting.

When I finally sold my photography site, I freed up mental space. I had no more reasons to wonder if there was one more tactic I should try to resurrect it.

Act like a scientist to make pivoting easier

My most successful pivot to date is related to my YouTube channel. I initially published dozens of videos about online marketing, particularly for course creators. Growth was sluggish at best.

But when I experimented with a couple videos about Notion, they got 10 times the average views of my channel. Then I tried more tutorials about Notion and other tools, and the initial signals were confirmed. Finally, I quit the “online marketing” topic entirely to focus only on digital tools for small businesses and freelancers.

Channel growth has never looked better, and the same goes for email subscribers and sales!

(For more details about this experiment, read here)

I was able to make this happen by regularly running low-risk experiments with my content and offers. When I get positive signals, like higher views, engagement or sales, I expand my experiments. When the data is unequivocal, I pivot.

Read this article for the complete guide on running content experiments to improve your growth.

Data may not be enough

Often, you can’t draw clear conlcusions from your data. Or your fears and biases are too strong. (Speaking from experience…)

What can you do? I try to get a more holistic view of the situation. It’s not a quantitative analysis, but it still brings more clarity.

I ask myself:

How do I feel when I think of staying on this path?
How do I feel when I think of trying the new path?
Did I try everything in my power to make things work?
Are there factors out of my control that have changed the environment?
Is the new path working for people in a similar situation?

For example, I started writing in English on Medium. In the beginning, it worked. But then the platform radically changed. To keep growing, I would have had to change topics or start publishing daily. It wasn’t in my power, so I moved to Substack.

It will always hurt, but…

I'm not here to tell you that you can turn gut-wrenching doubt into a walk in the park.

I'm grateful for the pivots and quits that allowed me to improve, but sometimes I still wonder if I could have done something more or different to make things work. Or I think that I should have chosen another path from the beginning.

But this is my perfectionist side talking. There's a wiser perspective.

Life isn't a straight road. We can't design a victorious path from the start, even with the help of the best mentors. If we want to grow, we need to run experiments. And, as every scientist knows, most experiments fail.

Content creators and solopreneurs are like scientists. They need to constantly try new things if they want to grow. Most times they’ll fail. But again, as scientists know, all experiments, even the failed ones, teach something.

To ensure my experiments aren't wasted, I always dive deep into what I'm doing so that I learn new skills, knowledge, and tools. So even the most miserable failure leaves me with something. And that something will probably help me skip some steps in my next experiment. I won't start from zero.

For example, I leveraged everything I learned about online writing in Italian when I started writing in English. I got immediately accepted in all the major publications on Medium.

The same holds for relationships. When you challenge yourself in public, you meet others on the same journey. Some of those relationships will continue even after quitting or pivoting, and they'll keep helping you in your life and business.

Conclusion

In your journey as a creator and solopreneur you will constantly have to make sharp turns. You’ll face hard decisions, but you can make them easier and benefit from them even if things go south:

accept pivoting and quitting as a part of the journey, don’t see them as threats to your self-worth,
don't let what you've already invested hold you back from making changes.
run constant experiments to collect data about future opportunities,
maximize your learnings, so that you can accumulate evergreen skills even when you fail,
investigate yourself and your context to help you decide,
build relationships, to enrich your life and get help.

I hope this helps you decide.

Are you facing a fork in the road right now?

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