How I quit Quiet Quitting

I was a quiet quitter before it was cool. Then I quit quiet quitting. This is the story of how that happened.

Refresher: “Quiet quitting”, also known as “acting your wage”, is today’s latest trend, the act of doing the minimum required for your job and never going above and beyond.

“Don’t you think you should work more hours?”

It was my first job out of college. I was a full time software developer but I was only working 4 hours a day. I’d stroll into the office at 11, take a long lunch break, and take off before 4.

One day my manager asked to talk to me.

My manager: “Don’t you think you should work more hours?”

Me: “I finished all my work.”

My manager: “Well, yes... that’s great, but don’t you think you should do more?”

Me: “Why would I do more work than I need to?”

My manager: “You want to do well in your career right? If you work more, it would be good for your career.”

Me: “No thanks.”

I knew exactly what the minimum amount of work was and I knew exactly what types of work I didn’t need to do.

Once, a friend asked me how I did it. “Recently people have been coming to me with questions and I don’t have time to do my own work, much less leave early! What do you do Jeff?”

My answer? “Why answer questions when you don’t have to? I just say ‘I don’t know’ whenever someone asks me something. They never come back after that!”

How I began quiet quitting

High school was hard for me. Every weekday I was forced to wake up early. Barely able to function, I had to sit there and pretend to pay attention while people talked at me for hours. I was assigned piles of meaningless work every day, so much work that I even had to work weekends. All I did was work. I didn’t feel human anymore. I was a robot, doing task after task, day after day, for 4 years.

When I got to college, I was finally free. Nobody forced me to wake up early. No piles of meaningless work. Best of all, nobody cared if I went to class or not.

Within a few months, I had nailed down the perfect schedule.

12 pm: Wake up, eat lunch

2 pm: Go back to sleep

6 pm: Wake up, eat dinner

8 pm: Hang out with friends until I'm tired

~4 am: Go to sleep

Every once in a while I had to show up for a test or submit a software program. Other than that I mostly slept. It was a blissful life.

My career

I took this attitude with me when I started working. After our conversation, my boss left me alone. I kept doing 4 hour days. I played sports every day and I slept a ton. I felt fantastic. I bragged to my friends how great I had it. Everyone else seemed to think being an adult was hard, but not me. I, in my brilliance, had solved life at the age of 22.

Then I got bored. Things were almost too easy. I decided to shake things up and I left. I didn’t stop doing the minimum though. That was the one part of my life that was working great.

Fast forward 10 years. I was bored, yet again. Each new job would stave off the boredom, but it always came back. Feeling unsatisfied, I looked up my old friends who I used to brag to. Now I envied them. They were doing newer, bigger, more interesting things. And where was I? In 10 years I had never been promoted. I was still in the same position in my career, doing the same things, playing the same game.

I thought I had solved the game of life. What I had actually done was create a different game, a boring game. I had no purpose, no imagination. Life was something I observed, not something I participated in.

Unhappy and bored, but still not realizing why, I left my job yet again. I started my new job, with a new manager. That manager changed my life.

Trust

My manager started with trust. “Jeff, you’re doing great, but there’s one thing that I want you to stop doing. I want you to stop running things by me. I trust you. I know that you know what to do, so stop asking me!”

This was out of my comfort zone. Why would I want to be accountable for anything? It was safer and easier for my manager to tell me what to do.

I thought it would be easy to stop, but it wasn’t. Sometimes I didn’t even know it was happening until my manager would point it out. “Jeff, you’re doing it again, stop asking me!”

As I started to make my own decisions, I started to make mistakes. I felt terrible. “I messed up bad. You trusted me and I failed you,” I told my manager. I wanted to give up.

My manager wouldn’t let me. “So what? You made a mistake. Everyone makes them. I trust that you can figure out how to bounce back from your mistakes. Now... no more questions!”

Slowly I got more comfortable with making my own decisions and I got more comfortable with making mistakes. No longer did I fall back on, “not my fault, I just did what I was told to do”.

Ownership

Along the way, a funny thing happened. I started to feel ownership and pride over the work I was doing. I was the one making decisions and that led me to care about the results. It’s an amazing feeling, an empowering feeling. It fed on itself. I wanted to improve. I wanted to get better. And I did. All of a sudden, I realized I was no longer doing the absolute minimum. I had quit quiet quitting.

The better I did, the more I was rewarded and the more I was entrusted with. My manager pushed me towards the next step. “I want you to guide the others on the team. Help them make the right decisions and help them succeed.”

Again, I had to step outside of my comfort zone. I had just barely started making decisions for myself, who was I to help others make decisions? I was scared. Now, my decisions affected other people and I often felt responsible and guilty when bad things happened. But I had already learned how to bounce back from mistakes. I kept going.

It turned out to be highly rewarding. I realized that I loved helping others succeed. It gave me a sense of purpose. My life had a spark now. I was no longer an observer, I was a participant.

The next 10 years

My next 10 years were an explosion of learning, growth, and change. I used the lessons from my manager to trust others and give them ownership. I learned how to help others succeed and how to build amazing and wonderful teams that I felt proud to be part of. My career flourished.

I looked at other areas of my life and realized I had been quitting there too. I got a coach. I tackled past traumas, stood up for myself, wrote essays, inspired people, created communities, invested in my family, and built friendships. None of this would have happened without that manager who trusted me, supported me, and encouraged me. I'll always be grateful to him.

It’s no coincidence that today I’m working at a company where our vision is that everyone in the workplace feels deeply understood, supported, and empowered to reach their goals. My personal and professional purposes intersect and I’ve never felt more aligned. Quick plug: If you're a manager, leader, or HR professional, feel free to reach out to me or check us out at risingteam.com.

Final thoughts

Quiet quitting felt great for a while, like I had beat the system. But it was an empty victory. I thought I was winning by doing less and caring less, when what I really did was give up my right to choose. Now, I choose my own path and live my own purpose and I’ve never felt happier.

Quiet quitting can be quite harmful if you let it control your life. But it also has its benefits. It helps you clearly see all the things you’re doing that don’t actually matter. Whenever I start to feel overwhelmed, when things start to spiral, I dig quiet quitting out of my toolbox. How can I reject as much as possible this week? What is the minimum I can do? What if I drop everything, would any of it really matter? Once I let go of everything, I can once again focus on what I really care about and want to be doing. How can I make the most out of my time? How can I thrive?

Are you quiet quitting? Is it a tool for a specific situation or is it a way of life? Let me know!

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Chris Wong, Jenn Gamble, Sharon Kam, Jennifer Lin, and Gary Yuen for reading my drafts and giving me feedback!