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MYTH: A WINNER NEVER QUITS

You have no doubt heard the old bromide "Quitters never win and winners never quit." While I am a great believer in dogged, unrelenting tenacity, I don't believe wholeheartedly in this little slogan. It is just another piece of our over-inflated sense of macho in business and in sports. The truth is, we are all quitters. The sooner we realize it, the better. Then we can get on with the business of overcoming it.

Some wise man once said that it's easier to start a love affair than to end one. Sometimes you have to quit - and sometimes it's the hardest but most important thing to do.

Let me tell you about the time I quit. It was in my next-to-last year in football, the 1977-78 season. The Vikings had lost their third Super Bowl with me as quarterback the season before. Never mind that it was me at the helm during all those winning games that got us into the Super Bowl in the first place; the Minnesota fans had decided Tarkenton was the reason they still didn't have that football-on-a-pedestal Super Bowl trophy in the local clubhouse. And they decided that Tarkenton had to go.  People used to come up to me on the street and in restaurants to tell me so. I could not put a bite of steak in my mouth without somebody who thought he knew more football than I did coming up to criticize and coach me so that we would never lose another Super Bowl. It reached the point that I just stopped going out in public.

Our third game of that season was against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Tampa Bay had come into the league the year before as an expansion team and had lost every game. Now they were in Minnesota playing the mighty Vikings - and we were losing in the fourth quarter!  Our great team had gotten a little bit older and we were simply not as good anymore. Jim Marshall and the great front four of our defense had their finest days behind them. We were struggling. In the fourth quarter, I think all 47,000 people in our stadium stood up and booed me.

I'll never forget that day. I had suffered some mighty booing in Yankee Stadium during my final season with the New York Giants in 1971. But nothing hurt me so much as the sound of those Vikings fans I had loved so much calling for my head on a platter during this game. Worse, they were shouting for Bud Grant to put in Tommy Kramer, the backup quarterback. "We want Kramer!  We want Kramer!" echoed back and forth across that old erector set of a stadium in Bloomington, Minnesota. That we lost the game did not help any, either.

I came off the field that day more depressed than I had ever been. I was angry with myself and angry with the fans. I was calling them no-good assholes and worse. I let them get under my skin. I let them control me. The shouts for Kramer kept echoing through my head all Sunday night, so much that I couldn't even sleep. The next morning I walked into Bud Grant's office and said, "I'm going to Atlanta and I'm not corning back." I was quitting.

He said, "You think about it and I'll call you at three o'clock tomorrow afternoon."

Well, the next day Bud called me in Atlanta at three o'clock. I said, "I've thought about it and I'm still quitting. I don't have to put up with the crap anymore. I've given this organization all I've got, and what do the people give me in return - boos and yelling for Kramer. I'm not going to play anymore."

Bud just said, "Well, Fran, I wish I had some magic word to tell you that would make you come back and play. But I don't. I just hope you understand that if you don't come back, we have no chance to make the play-offs this year."

Well, that really hit me! I thought to myself, "You selfish son of a bitch. Here you have forty-four teammates out there. Old Tingelhoff and Marshall are up there busting their backsides. They're old and tired and they're still trying. And just because you got booed, you're going to run off and throw their chances to the wolves."

I just hung up and packed my bags. Got the next plane back to Minneapolis. Never said a word to anyone, just showed up for Wednesday practice. Most people never knew I was gone, never knew I had quit.

Everybody quits. We've all got some quit in us. It is a normal human reaction. Luckily for me, I had a coach who was sensitive enough to find the trigger point that brought me back.

The trick, it seems to me, is not to say, "Winners never quit." On the contrary, winners are the people who recognize the desire every one of us has to quit when faced with adversity and who develop ways of dealing with it. I have never met an athlete or a competitor of any kind whose first impulse isn't to quit when things are not going well.
There were times in the middle of a game, when I couldn't seem to complete any of the important passes, when I just said to myself, "I just can't get this job done, it ain't worth it, I want to quit." It's part of everyday life.

In business, salesmen go through this all the time. They get so many doors slammed in their faces and have a sales slump. One prospect shouts at him over the phone: "Don't call me again! I'm tired of hearing from you!" The salesman begins to drag.  He makes fewer sales calls. He walks more slowly. He loses his mental toughness. His business begins to slide. He has let the outside pressures get to him.

This is the same as letting the booing fans in the stadium shape my attitude toward the game: I quit. This is what happens to the salesman in his slump. That's the time to remember those good weeks and months that have gone before. Your inner knowledge of yourself is the most important source of power you have. You have to control your attitude, not let others do it for you.

I think there is a great lesson for managers here in the way Coach Grant handled me. A lot of coaches might have gotten angry and called me a no-good bastard and said they were glad I was gone. That would have sealed it: if Bud had said something like that to me, I never would have come back. But because he had sensitive understanding and common sense, Bud not only got me back, he got me playing better football for the rest of the season. We did make the play-offs that year!

Bud's great compassionate management style wasn't gushy; it was sincere and specific - totally businesslike. He didn't tell me I had a bad attitude, he merely showed me what the results of my quitting might be. (Remember how we pointed out earlier that scorekeeping means distinguishing between behaviors and the results of those behaviors.)

Bud always reminded me of one of America's other great managers: Robert W. Woodruff, the legendary chairman emeritus of the Coca-Cola Company. I worked there briefly as a junior executive in their management-training program, during the off- seasons of 1966-67. I learned a lot at Coca-Cola. One lesson I learned there was that quitting could give you fresh perspective on yourself, could even make you feel like a self-starter, a winner. Mr. Woodruff knew this, too. Once he called in the entire sales force and told them in no pretty terms that the sales department was being abolished and that they were jobless. If they felt like quitters and acted like quitters, he'd force them to quit - as simple as that. But Mr. Woodruff told them to report the next morning for their final instructions.

The former salesmen retired uneasily to their hotels.  When they reassembled the next day. Woodruff announced that the company was forming a service department and would welcome their applications for jobs in it.  The message Woodruff delivered was that their job was not just selling Coca-Cola, but servicing their customers' needs. He got the reps to surpass their performance by showing them that if they gave less than 100 percent, they were quitters. And feeling less than 100 percent committed made them feel less than the best - so why not recognize that and start again? They did, and turned Coca-Cola into the world's best selling product. Woodruff's successors have calculated that if all the Coca-Cola ever consumed by the human race were poured over Niagara Falls, "the Falls would flow at their normal rate for eight hours and fifty-seven minutes." Not bad for a bunch of quitters.

FACT: Quitting is not the opposite of winning - it's part of winning.

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