The Real Reason You Quit (It's not Motivation)
Brendon Burchard argues people quit to escape difficult emotions like fatigue and frustration, not because of external obstacles. He pushes endurance, celebrating small wins, and building cultures where people feel appreciated. The real barrier isn't motivation; it's managing the emotions that make you want to stop.
Chapters
Stress is only a function of time. If you remove time, stress tends to go away. So we stress ourselves out because an expectation of time. And I go, you don't get to control time. You get to control attitude and effort. What you have to do is show up with a great attitude and lead anyway and let time take care of itself. People don't usually quit because the payoff isn't there in terms of whatever that status, that result, that wealth, that money, that thing is. It's usually not that we think it is because we want to prevent, pretend that quitting is an external thing. Right? It's very easy for leaders to go, I'm quitting because. Insert external thing. I'm quitting because interest rates. I'm quitting because tariffs. I'm quitting because this, you know, political thing. I'm quitting because of what happened across town. We. We externalize it. But most people do not quit a thing. They seek to abandon difficult emotions. You're not quitting a thing. You're abandoning difficult emotions. That's what most people quit for. You know, you're not quitting the concept of a marriage as an example. You're abandoning the feelings that you have in that marriage. So it's not the ideal. It's not the concept, it's not the industry. It's not the philosophy. It's the sense of emotion and feeling. And when we get to the point of quitting, we became fatigued. It's just like we're really abandoning the mental or emotional exhaustion of a thing that we have been pushing against. We've been pushing against. We've been trying. We've been pushing that boulder for a while. We're not really quitting the boulder. We're quitting because of fatigue. When you're tired, you forget you're doing good. When you're tired, when you're frustrated, when you're in your feelings, you kind of. You lose the sense of the ripple effect. Stress is only a function of time, that if you remove time, stress tends to go away. So we stress ourselves out because an expectation of time, or in other words, you feel the pressure of time. You feel. Know, if you. If you all went to college or you were in high school and you had a paper that was due, and the paper was due, you know, on Friday, and you were freaking out Thursday night about that paper being due on Friday, and you go to class and the teacher says, hey, you know what? I changed my mind, y'. All. It's due on Monday. All of a sudden you have this huge relief. Now, the thing itself is still due, right? Paper still must be manifested. But you just got two extra days, you feel relief. Why? Because stress is a function of time. Peace is often a function of time. Life is a function of time. And so if you feel like you're not going fast enough, that is causing a type of distress, isn't it? I want to go faster, I want more deals, I want to move faster. I should be building wealth faster. It has to happen now on this specific timeline that I'm dictating to the universe. I am telling God in universe, it must happen on my timeline because, you know, I'm very important on Instagram. And so we have a narcissistic tendency with time. And I go, you don't get in control time, you get to control attitude and effort, you get to control direction. But time, you, you gotta let these things work out. You don't get to push yourself against the economy or against the Fed. Like that's not how it works. What you have to do is show up with a great attitude and lead anyway in that space and let time take care of itself. And again, I'm using a lot of lang, I'm using tons of words here because I know it's different for everybody. But capture some of these. It's feelings, it's fatigue, it's frustration, maybe it's weariness. On a positive aspect, it's more about endurance. It's enduring things. Great leaders endure difficult times. You will not find a single great biography on the shelf that isn't that story of endurance. There is no great story, no heroic story, no builder story, no billionaire story, without pretty impressive endurance. When everybody else was weary and bailed, they stayed in the battle, they stayed in motion. And they did that because they could see that more distant future. They stayed more for the business people in the room, strategic minded. I work with a guy, he, he is a billionaire and he's, you know, the old school. We just call him industrialist, right, because he owns things like trucking companies and port companies and warehouses. Like a true old fashioned, like industrialist kind of guy, right? Very, very humble, you know, none of you would know his name kind of person, but, you know, a big player in the world economy for sure. And he was sharing one time, I thought, a really powerful strategic mindset. He says, see most of my peers, Brandon, they quit as the economy is, you know, a certain, you know, inflection point. It's very easy to quit at those points. He says, but what kept me going was the strategic realization that in fact, everything actually is getting easier. So when you realize there's always going to be downtrends, but the strategic game is to work your way into the ease, then you go, oh, wow, I could be better equipped in the future. Let me not quit now when I could be better equipped soon. You got to remind yourself you're going to be better equipped. And in fact, often a downtrend equips you with an unfair advantage. And you have to convince yourself and your team that, hey, things are hard right now. That's an advantage. So leaders have all this optimism. When things are growing, that optimism has to stay. When they're going down, leaders tend to go quiet because they're like, oh, was I wrong? I told my team we were going to grow by 7%. Now we're struggling. Was I wrong? What I told my spouse, Was I wrong about the opportunity, Was I wrong? And now your personal identity is in and you're like, maybe I was wrong. And you go quiet versus leading through hard times. Lead anyway. Lead as if I'm telling. I tell all my sports coaches, I go. Lead as if you're winning the game. Always lead as if you were. Lead as if you were in the ultimate power position. This doesn't fail to acknowledge the difficulties because actually, when you're in a power position, you can see competition for what it is. When you're in a power position, you can acknowledge truth. Ultimate power is literally capital T, truth. So when you're in a power position, you can acknowledge truth. You can go, hey, troops, this sucks. We're running out of food. The, the other guys, they're bigger. They've been fighting longer than we have. So you don't fail to acknowledge it. Remember to read your Churchill. Andrew Roberts, Walking with Destiny. If any of you are struggling in leadership, please read the book Walking With Destiny. Churchill, Andrew Roberts, Pulitzer Prize winning. Probably the greatest book ever written on a single solitary leader in terms of leadership principle, but also true story. And so you realize if you read or pay attention to Churchill's speeches and actions, especially from 43 to 45, you're like, Whoa, this guy was speaking in a power position, even though he's saying the other guys are probably going to kill us. I mean, it's pretty dire stuff. And so I like to read stuff like that during these times because it emboldens me and reminds me, no, no. Lead from a power position. You can acknowledge the difficulties. That's truth. But when you hold the enthusiasms, when you hold the optimism, when you lead through it anyway, the People shall rise and you shall reap if you do not quit, if you do not give up. Ask much of yourselves if you want greatness, if you want true wealth, if you want great leadership. Ask a lot. And great leaders ask a lot of people. They ask a lot of themselves. And let me come to a very simple reason that a lot of people quit. It's not just the difficulty, because you've already endured difficulty. It's not just the thing because you've already seen the thing go up and down. So you already know the rhythms and ups and downs. You already know hard work. These are not new things in your life. What happened was either A, the progress is not happening at the speed you want and or B, praise is absent. You want to see a leader of baal, they're not getting praised. People don't quit because of failure. They quit because they didn't integrate the success. They didn't integrate and feel the wins. The wins W I n S because they didn't integrate the win. They didn't develop the psychological strength and celebration and future focus that is needed in the fails and the downtrends. A lot of leaders quit out of frustration that no one is going, hey man, I appreciate you working on the weekends because some of you go, why work so hard? No one sees it and no one appreciates it. But that's not a reason to quit a purpose. It's not a reason to quit the future. It's not a reason to quit something you built or you promised or you have obligation and duty to. It's instead, it's a reason to ask for it more to build that culture. And I think that's what's really important is leading anyway means you also, when you don't feel the praise you give the praise you ask for the praise. Send me your ships, send me your praise you got. You, like, tell people, like, hey, this is really frustrating. I feel like I'm working really hard and I know you must be working hard too. But it doesn't feel like we're celebrating it. And in down times and difficult times, we actually have to celebrate a little bit more. Most people celebrate when they're succeeding and go quiet when they're failing, when we actually need the opposite. We need more acknowledgement, celebration, encouragement, praise when we're down. That builds resolve and hope and puts people back into a strategic mind versus feelings. And I promise it will make a difference for you if you just revisit that in your own life. Am I being. Am I being praised enough for what I really need and no one here is a needy person. Right? This is not a therapy session. But I do think it's a really important thing to consider because a lot of weariness is not like physical fatigue. You're tired of not being acknowledged. You know, appreciation is the number one reason people get divorced. It's not finances, it's not the kids, it's not the concept of marriage. It's that somebody, it doesn't feel appreciated anymore. The number one reason mid level managers in corporate America leave a job isn't because they're disengaged from the work. It's because they don't feel appreciated by the first line manager above them. Organizational behavior finds it over and over and over and over again. The psychology of an organization is tied a lot to appreciation. And appreciation needs to go up in any down moment. Appreciate needs to go, which feels counter because what you want to do and I want to do when we're great leaders, especially when you're a high performing leader, when everybody performs lower, which leads to a downtrend, you get frustrated and you start leading with frustration versus fire for the future and fire of encouragement for them and they feel your frustration at them. The leader's frustration becomes the follower's resentment. Soon as you blame them, you get tired or wary of them, they feel it and they become resentful towards you and you think they're resentful because of your hard work. They just want to be like me. They just wish they could work as hard as me. Well, oh, be careful now, you're resentful. What's really happening is that they're sensing they're not doing enough and that feels like crap. When you feel like you're not doing enough, it feels terrible. Now it can be true, you can acknowledge performance, but anytime you have to acknowledge, you know, a down performance, you also have to simultaneously lift up, bet on the future, put some optimism out there. That's what leaders do. They lead anyway. They lead despite difficulty, they lead despite slow progress, they lead despite a bunch of people in a bad attitude. That's what makes it hard. And I'm here to tell people all the time I go, you know, the reason you don't quit is to show yourself that you can do hard things to separate from the competition who can't convince themselves they can do hard things to maintain the relationships. Now that you will reap in due season if you do not quit. Hey, my friend, sun is going down behind me and I just want to thank you for watching my YouTube channel. You know, so many of my subscribers are always asking me, brendan, how do I go to another level of my life and stay consistent in my personal development, really get progress? You know, we all want to be more motivated, more productive, more confident. We want to be better leaders, we want to be better at our craft. But how do you do that on a consistent basis? Well, that's why I built Growth Day. It's an app that you can use that builds your personal growth streak, that every day you come in and you do a series of actions and you listen to some inspirational training and life strategies that advances your life. It's very hard to stay consistent in your life. I know sometimes you watch a YouTube video, you read a book here, you listen to a podcast there, but you're not developing your habits, you're not scoring yourself. You're not finding real progress and insight that kind of wows you and opens up to, I say, the awe and the real agency that you have in life. So please go to Growth Day in the absolute. Just go to the App Store, go to Growth Day, or go to growthday.com and get growth day. I promise you, with your seven day free trial, you'll go through Growth Day and in seven days you'll be like, totally, totally, like feeling fired up. But also you'll find a new momentum. Because every day as you do your growth streak, you start to really discover what you're made of. And we access different parts of your brain. You're listing something inspirational. You're doing a checklist or doing a journal prompt that blows your mind. You're scoring your habits and reflecting on your day in ways you've never done before. We're basically taking all of personal development and putting it into a streak that you'll get, like, totally addicted to. You'll be addicted to that progress, that growth, that joy and energy that you deserve to feel every day. Go to growthday.com or go to the App Store and just download the Growth Day app. Start, start your 7 day free trial and let's level you up. Every day is a great day to grow, but you have to stay consistent to get real progress and to really change your Life. Go to growthday.com or go to the App Store and get the Growth Day app right now.
