Is It Still Worth What It Costs?
How to decide whether to keep going, change your approach or walk away.
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Welcome to REWIRE | REBOOT, a weekly newsletter where I share reflections from my ongoing personal growth journey and provide tested ideas, frameworks, tools and practices to help you create the life you want.
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In this issue:
- Rewire - Knowing When to Stop
- One Action - Would You Still Choose This?
- Reboot - Push Hard. Know When to Back Off.
- Recommended - Why Quitting is Underrated
Rewire - Idea I'm Exploring
Knowing When to Stop
Four and a half weeks before the 2007 IFBB World Championships, I decided I wasn’t going.
I was in the best condition of my life. I was also miserable.
Earlier that year, I had won the superheavyweight division of the CBBF World Qualifier for the second consecutive year. I had represented Canada at the World Championships in Czech Republic in 2006 and qualified to return in 2007, this time in South Korea.
I started training at 14, idolizing Arnold Schwarzenegger and following his routines. By my early twenties, I was competing and wanted to earn my pro card. For 10 years, bodybuilding had been a hobby that felt more like a second career.
By 2007, I knew going professional wasn’t realistic. I had the work ethic, the discipline and had pushed myself beyond what I once thought possible. But I also had to be honest about my genetic potential.
I wasn’t completely satisfied with what I had achieved in the sport. There had been wins, an appearance on the international stage and some humbling losses. I still wanted more.
But another appearance on the international stage wasn’t worth the sacrifices I was making: training 4-5 hours per day across three sessions while working full time as a CPA and tax specialist. Intense dieting (which I hated). Too little sleep. Time with family and friends on hold.
So I stopped preparing for the competition.
The competitive fire didn’t disappear. I briefly started training for a comeback in 2008, before injury sidelined me. I never stepped onstage again, but walking away hadn’t resolved every feeling I had about the sport.
You can still want the outcome and decide you’re no longer willing to pay the price.
Restaurant ownership required a different decision.
I owned two franchise locations. One performed well; the other struggled. After two years of working my ass off trying to make them both successful, I was able to sell the profitable one. Then I handed back the keys to the other. That felt like admitting failure. But I couldn’t see a viable way to turn it around. I accepted the debts and spent the next few years paying them off. Continuing would have cost more of my time and money, with little reason to expect a different result.
We hear “don’t be a quitter” or “never give up” so often that stopping can feel like a judgement on our character. As though more discipline, more effort or another year will always get us there.
That can keep us in a job we no longer enjoy, a relationship that has become unhealthy, or a business we keep funding without a credible plan to turn it around. We think about the years, money and effort we’ve already invested. Walking away feels like making all of that a waste. But putting in more won’t necessarily recover what we’ve lost. Sometimes it just digs the hole deeper.
I fully believe in doing hard things. And that most things worth doing are going to be difficult, involve periods of frustration, doubt and slow progress. A bad week is a poor basis for abandoning something that matters to you.
But difficulty alone doesn’t tell you whether to keep going. You also have to consider whether the goal is still important, whether there’s a reasonable path forward, and what continuing is costing you elsewhere in your life.
Sometimes you need patience, help or a different approach. Sometimes the likely outcome no longer justifies what it would take to get there. Fear of looking like someone who quit shouldn’t make that decision for you.
Leaving competition didn’t erase those 10 years. I kept training, and the discipline and lessons carried over into the rest of my life. I no longer needed to step on stage for that work to have value.
You can respect what you’ve put into something and still decide it’s time to put your effort somewhere else.
One Action
Would You Still Choose This?
Choose one commitment you’ve been questioning and give it 10 minutes of honest thought.
Write down your answers:
- What would continuing for another six months require of me, and what would I have to give up to do it?
- What outcome can I realistically expect, and what makes me believe that?
- Knowing what I know now, would I choose to make that investment?
Consider whether it makes sense to recommit with a clear focus, test a different approach or begin planning a responsible exit.
If you’re unsure, identify the information you need and set a date to revisit the decision.
Let me know how it goes. Just reply to this email.
Reboot - Health & Longevity
Push Hard. Know When to Back Off.
Leaving competition didn’t mean leaving the gym. But I also had to learn when to change how I trained.
In resistance training, failure is a state we should seek. As in muscular failure, which means reaching the point where you can’t complete another repetition with proper form. Training close to that point helps build muscle, and reaching it should often be the goal.
But not every set needs to end in failure. In a small eight-week study of 18 trained adults, stopping with one or two repetitions left in reserve produced similar average quadriceps growth to reaching failure, with less immediate fatigue.
How close you get to failure is also different from how heavy you lift. A lighter weight can still produce a hard set. And for maximal strength, getting closer to failure doesn’t appear to offer the same consistent advantage.
I wanted more muscle and more strength, and I wanted to lift heavier every workout. I had to learn the value of periodization: planning changes in weight, repetitions and training volume over time, including easier periods.
As I changed my approach, my strength improved and I experienced far fewer injuries. A review of 35 studies found a strength advantage for periodized training, even when total training volume was matched.
I was giving my training a plan I could progress through and recover from.
I found a simpler approach to nutrition, too. Prioritizing protein, healthy fats, vegetables and some fruit, while limiting sugar and starchy carbohydrates, made maintaining my diet easier without needing to count calories or measure macros. This approach suits me, and may work for you, but it’s not a formula everyone needs to follow. The best formula for each individual is the one they will actually stick to.
We can stay committed to our health while changing how we pursue it. The level of effort matters, and so does whether we can recover and keep going.
Recommended Read
Why Quitting Is Underrated — Annie Duke
Annie Duke explores why our past investments of time, money and effort make it difficult to stop. It’s a useful companion to this week’s One Action exercise, especially if “I’ve already put too much into this” keeps showing up in your reasoning.
Inspirational Quote
“Remember that to change your mind and to accept correction are free acts too.”
— Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 8.16
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Until next week,
Kevin
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