Emotional intelligence is the practiced awareness of how emotions affect your communications and efforts, coupled with strategies that you develop to leverage your emotions and other people's emotions in order to help you achieve goals.

“I left my job because I realized that I’d followed someone else's plan for my life, and even if it had worked out on paper, I wasn't thrilled with the result; meanwhile, the fear of simply being branded "a quitter" had stopped me from finding an off-ramp earlier.”

We encourage people not to quit even though it's like a series of textbook examples of what economic theory tells us not to do: basically, the sunk cost fallacy, which drives people to continue a course of action in order to just...

Quitting a job that's a bad fit, or even just not as great a fit as it might once have seemed, is for many people a sign of high emotional intelligence.

Most people have one of two reactions:

1. Explanation 1: Nobody wants to work. Businesses now face incredible challenges hiring and retaining good employees, and it's because people have developed unreasonable expectations about what their jo...

Both explanations miss the point.

1. Explanation 1 is too tied up in its undercurrent of misplaced moralism: the idea that employees owe their places to their employers, and that workers in a larger sense have an obligation to work -- and especially to work for employer...

We encourage people to continue on certain courses of action because they're the courses of action they've already put time and effort into:

• Continue trying to make that flawed startup work;
• Keep working at that job because it's the one you trained for;

“I left my job because I simply considered my value as a worker and realized that the people I was working for couldn't or wouldn't ever likely be able to perceive it.”

It’s certainly swimming upstream, trying to get people to embrace the idea of "quitting" as a morally neutral word at least, and perhaps even something to be admired in the aggregate.

But emotionally intelligent people know: Stripping the abstract emotional connotations of the conce...

“People who quit things are losers.”

“Quitting one thing makes it easier to quit other things later in life .”

“I left my job because I realized that I’d stuck around too long out of a misplaced sense of moral duty.”

“I left my job because I thought hard about what I was doing for a living, and realized it didn't fit with my long-term goals.”

We can't know whether it's a "good" thing or not without knowing the object of the verb. Examples:

• "He quit trying to raise more investment and focused instead on bootstrapping the company."
• "She quit trying to sell into that market because these other ones wer...