An Excellent Wknd [26.03]
Some thoughts on quitting
Hello, hi, 👋
Happy Saturday, my friends. Here’s hoping it’s filled with long walks and deep breaths.
Let’s get into it.
YOU CAN QUIT TOMORROW
Olympic gold medalist Nastia Liukin hated practice. She’d come home and tell her mom: “I’m never going back.”
Her mom had a simple response: “That’s totally fine. You can quit, but not today.”
She’d make Nastia go back to the gym the next day and the next day until she had at least one good day. Then she’d say, “OK, now you can quit.” Nastia would always respond, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I never said I wanted to quit.”
The lesson her mom was teaching: you can’t quit on a bad day.
Liukin kept going back. Eventually, she won five Olympic medals, including gold in the all-around at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Not because she was born with passion. Because she built it through the discipline of not quitting on bad days.
Most of us aren’t born with a clear passion. We stumble into things. We try them. Some feel hard. Some feel boring. Some feel pointless. The temptation is to stop when it gets uncomfortable and try something else.
But here’s what happens when we quit the moment something gets hard: we train ourselves that discomfort is a reason to stop. That commitment is optional. That the way to find passion is to keep sampling until something feels easy.
That’s backwards. Passion doesn’t come from finding the perfect thing. It comes from getting good at something. And you can’t get good without pushing through the part where it’s hard and you don’t feel like showing up.
The next time you want to quit something - the gym membership, the side project, the new skill that’s frustrating you - apply Nastia’s mom’s rule: you can quit, but not today. Not on a bad day. Go back tomorrow. And the next day. Until you have one good day.
What usually happens is different than you expect. Once you push through the hard part and start developing skill, something shifts. Competence creates confidence. Confidence creates enjoyment. Enjoyment starts to look like passion.
You don’t find passion by trying a hundred things. You build it by refusing to quit when one thing gets hard.
Transparency you can see. Testing you can trust: Every Momentous product is NSF or Informed Sport Certified — tested for contaminants, heavy metals, and banned substances.
What’s on the label is exactly what’s in the product.
🎧 Anti-Fragile Confidence: Your Protocol Beats Your Motivation (w/ Brian Johnson)
Building confidence that strengthens through challenges rather than breaking down when things get hard.
🎧 Anchor Your Mission, Adapt Your Methods: Thriving in an AI-Driven World (w/ Zack Kass)
Navigating the AI revolution while redefining your identity beyond work and discovering what makes you uniquely human.
❤️🔥 The Daily Chase
Brief, focused essays delivered each weekday morning to Chase Club members.
On Monday, friend-of-the-show EC Synkowski joins us to talk about the latest USDA dietary guidelines and FDA food labeling rules.
We’ll explore why new guidelines and “healthy” labels probably won’t change our collective eating habits unless we address the real issue: the modern food environment itself.
Until then, keep on chasing.
🤙🏼 Patrick
Chasing Excellence is an audience-supported project. To go deeper & to help us do even more, consider:
Subscribing to get our free posts or upgrading to receive the Daily Chase posts & the ChaseTracker app.
Grabbing one of our books: Chasing Excellence, Unlocking Potential, or The ABCs of Being Happy & Healthy.
Supporting one of our fantastic show sponsors.