1-10 Simplify
Larry Ferstenou felt "giddy as a child" the day he walked away from his vocational rehabilitation business. "Quit because you have other things you want to do," counsels Ferstenou, who developed a goal of retiring young and enjoying his life after watching his father work at a job he hated and die at age 52. And before you quit, try out your new interests. If you want to quit to paint or write, for example, try to paint and write first, and see if you really are suited for it.
Sit or spin? Then the question remains of how to go about quitting. When Cathy O'Neill of Atlanta was 21, she left her job and America to spend three years in an experimental community in India called Auroville. Now 50, she works for a company called Maroma that supports Auroville by exporting incense, candles, and other products around the world. Elisabeth Wadsworth was 25 in 2001 when she and two friends quit lucrative careers in Boston and moved to San Francisco. Wadsworth was unemployed for 14 months, but she doesn't regret her decision. "It gave me such freedom," she recalls.
Those with responsibilities like mortgages, spouses, and children don't have the same luxury, of course. Joe Patti, 58, of Chatham, N.J., spent most of his life working on Wall Street in information technology for financial institutions. Then he had his house remodeled, and the builder, recognizing Patti's organizational skills, asked him to come on as an employee. Patti weighed an offer he had at Standard & Poor's against the one to manage local housing sites. Despite his wife's preference that he stay corporate, Patti could not resist going to work in muddy boots, sweatpants, and a hard hat--all while taking about a 40 percent pay cut.
While Patti endures steady criticism from his wife for tracking mud into the house, storing construction materials in the garage, and letting his obsession with the job take over their weekends and evenings, he has no plans to go back to three-hour daily commutes and a suit and tie. "I thought that we'd see more of each other in our late 50s, not less," says his wife, Joan. Instead, she concedes, "I'll just keep on nagging, and he'll keep on telling me things are going to change. It's kind of the way it's been for 32 years."
Janet Luhrs quit being a lawyer after just two weeks to stay home with her children. She became an early pioneer of the voluntary simplicity movement. "I think that people just don't see past the box that they're in," she says. A single parent with a mortgage, Luhrs was able to scale back, get creative (she turned her basement into a rental unit), and support her family as a writer and speaker.
Then there's Evan Harris, author of The Art of Quitting , who has quit her full-time fascination with quitting. She also quit the single life in New York City and is now married and living in East Hampton with her husband and baby. "There was a point when I stopped thinking about quitting only as rejection but began to think of it as embracing as well," says Harris. Sticking with something you hate may take hard work, after all, but knowing when to quit, that takes wisdom. -Caroline Hsu
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