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Just realized my parents never let me quit anything, and now I'm 35 and can't walk away from a bad haircut
When I was 12 I wanted to quit Little League mid-season because I was terrible and hated it, and my dad said Murphy men finish what they start. So I played 4 more miserable weeks, struck out 11 times, and cried in the car twice. Fast forward to now and I sat through a 45 minute haircut last month at a place in Boise even after the guy nicked my ear, because walking out felt impossible. Was that rule teaching me grit or just teaching me to ignore my own gut? Curious if anyone else had the finish what you start rule and whether you think it helped or messed you up.
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mason_black8d ago
The part nobody talks about is how this rule gets wired into your body, not your brain. By the time you're an adult you're not making a choice to stay anymore, you just feel a kind of panic at the thought of leaving, like your nervous system thinks quitting equals danger. I dealt with the same thing for years, sitting in bad movies, bad jobs, bad relationships, all because some voice in my head said leaving meant I was weak. What finally helped was realizing the rule only ever worked one direction. My parents never once sat me down and said hey, this thing is bad for you, it's okay to stop. That's not grit, that's just one half of a life skill, and your gut is the other half. Learning to tell the difference between "this is hard and worth it" and "this is bad and I should go" is the actual lesson, and it sounds like nobody taught you that part.
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