1. Read the poem 

2. Do your own reflection on it, noting what it inspires in you

3. Feel free to use your own reflection as your prompt or…

4. Use the selection of prompts in the column on the right

5. Pick one that inspires you and write (feel free to use only one or write several poems using different prompts) or…

6. Don’t use any of the provided prompts and follow your inspiration from wherever it comes

Excerpt From Quit by Annie Duke

This excerpt follows a story about three hikers who obeyed the “turnaround rule” for the last leg of the climb up Mount Everest (If you wil lnot reach the peak by 1:00 PM, turn around and go back to base camp). They returned to base camp and safely down the mountain while others in their group who ignored the rule and pushed on to the peak and fell to their death on the descent:

We tend to think only about one side of the human response to adversity: the ones who go for it. The people who continued up the mountain become the heroes of the story, tragic or otherwise. They’re the ones who catch our attention, the ones who persevered, despite not having adhered to the turnaround time.

The story of the climbers who turned around on summit day was out there for the telling, but apparently not for the remembering.

There is no doubt that quitting is an important decision-making skill. Getting the decision right is sometimes a matter of life or death. That was the case on Everest. But even in this life-or-death situation, we don’t seem to remember the quitters at all.

The problem with this is, of course, that we learn to get better at things from experience, either our own experience or by watching others. And our ability to learn from experience can only be as good as our memory of those experiences.

This is no less true for decisions about quitting.

How can we learn if we don’t even see the quitters? Worse yet, how are we supposed to learn if, when we do see them, we view them negatively, as people not worthy of our admiration, as cowards or poltroons?

Admittedly, “poltroon” is an obscure word now, but it’s a synonym for quitter that used to be quite popular, sufficiently nasty that if you called someone a poltroon, they were within their rights to challenge you to a duel. When Charles Dickinson called Andrew Jackson a coward and a poltroon in a local newspaper in 1806, Jackson challenged Dickinson to a duel, killed him, and it didn’t stop Jackson from becoming president in 1829.

If calling someone a quitter is grounds to shoot them, how can we expect people to appreciate how important it is to become skilled at walking away?

Duke, Annie. Quit (pp. 9-10). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Prompt Ideas

1. Journal or write a poem about a time when you pushed yourself beyond a threshold.

2. Consider somethig you feel compelled to do. What drives you to do it? How do you stop once you start?

3. Journal or write a poem about something that you wanted to quit doing but kept at it because others wanted you to do it.

4. Journal or write a list poem about things (behaviors, projects, goals, roles, jobs, pets people, etc.) you have quit.

5. Riff on the word “quit” What thoughts, associations, images, and memories, come to mind from the word? Have you ever been called, or called someon else, a “quitter” or the equivalent (a loser)? Capture the moment and describe the consequences.

6. Journal or write a poem based on an obscure or archaic word, like “poltroon.”

7. Journal or write a poem titled, “Instructions for Walking Away.”

8. As usual, write about anything else in the poem or in life that inspires you.