Editorial: Why don’t you just quit?

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by Bobby Jonte

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.” That’s a quote from Chaucer. (You know, the father of English Literature) There are lots of quotes. I’ve said a bunch of them. Over the past thirty years, I’ve read all sorts of thing like that. I just did a project that took over a year and almost everyday I would say, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” There are a bunch of those things and they all have some truth to them. If you can follow them there is a lot of success ahead of you. Many things have been accomplished by taking some little steps on projects everyday. It’s taken a lot of patience and perseverance. Now I’ve gotten to the point that I don’t read all these quotes so much. The quotes are still good but I seem to be running out of time. I got the “Why don’t you just quit” quote from Jay Leno. He was being interviewed on a television show about working as a comedian. He talked about what he did everyday and what it took to succeed as a comedian. One of the audience members said he went to a comedy club every three months to try out some jokes. He asked what else he should do. Jay Leno said, “Why don’t you just quit?” Leno had a valid point. He said that he was not going enough to do anything. He needed to do something everyday to learn. He was never going to get the 1500 shows or sets that would make him a good comedian. He should realize that he was just kidding himself. He thought he was trying to be a comedian but he really wasn’t doing anything to get there. I thought that was some of the best info I had heard in a long time. There are projects that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. The problem with some of these projects was I wasn’t putting in time into them. There are projects that I’ve seen completed that took 22 years. Now there are still projects out there but at the rate I’ve been going they would take over 22 years to complete. That’s the problem. There aren’t a couple of decades available to complete these things. Since I’ve realized that I’m not going to be able to finish some of these, it has cut down on my worrying and having to read so many motivational quotes. That’s freed up some time to do other things. There are still lots of good quotes but I have cut down on looking at them. “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet,” by Abraham Lincoln is still a favorite. My new motto is going to lean toward “Why don’t you just quit?” That means I can procrastinate and goof off and not feel guilty. That really helps. Now there is time to start on something new. Well, at least I can try a first step at something new. I still have some good quotes. “No task is so big that you can’t take the first step.” If its too much of a struggle to get the first step, I’ll just quit.