Quitter Summary

1-Sentence-Summary: Quitter is a blueprint to help you close the gap between your day job and your dream job, showing you simple steps you can take towards your dream without turning it into a nightmare.

Read in: 4 minutes

Favorite quote from the author:

Quitter Summary

Audio Summary

Listen to the audio of this summary with a free reading.fm account*:

Jon Acuff knew he wanted to be a writer when he looked back on his life in a moment of clarity, and saw himself happily handing in a book his third grade teacher had told him to write, which was then laminated and bound, like a real book.

Somehow, like most of us, he got stuck along the way, where he worked good jobs and bad jobs, for example as a mailman, a copywriter and a speaker for Dave Ramsey.

Quitter is the first of his 3 bestselling books and it explains the steps he took to go from dread job to dream job without killing himself.

Here are 3 great lessons to learn from it:

  1. Getting your dream job does not begin with quitting your current one.
  2. Hustle in the morning (even if you’re a night owl).
  3. Define what enough means to you up front.

Ready to close the career gap? Here we go!

If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want.

Download PDF

Lesson 1: Getting your dream job does not begin with quitting your current one.

Just earlier this week we learned from Jeff Goins that only 13% of people actually like to show up for work in the morning.

Yes, this terrible statistic needs changing, but hold your horses.

This does not mean you should just quit your job.

Jon says you should let your day job fuel your dream job, instead of quitting it. Quitting will likely lead you to 2 major problems:

  1. You replace your boss with lots of mini bosses a.k.a your bills. Instead of just Mr. Smith yelling at you now have the water company, gas supplier, your landlords and several insurance companies banging down your door. That means you just changed who dictates your life, but not the fact itself.
  2. You put a serious strain on your relationships. Constantly being worried about money gives you a very negative, neurotic and aggressive mindset. This may lead you as far as destroying some of your most precious relationships, just because you yelled at your partner for leaving the light on one time too much.

Instead, keep your day job. Find meaning in it by helping your co-workers and trying to see the parallels to your dream job – there are always skills you can re-use.

This makes it less likely for you to jump at an opportunity that might seem okay, but isn’t actually what you truly want, or even worse, to take an opportunity because you have no other choice.

Lesson 2: Always hustle in the morning, even if you think you’re a night owl.

Hustle is the most important word, ever. At least if you ask Gary Vaynerchuk 🙂

It’s a word Jon uses a lot too, and it’s gotten really popular on social media as well. What it boils down to is putting in the time that is needed to reach your goals.

But when should you actually do it? If you have a day job, that leaves only mornings and nights.

Jon makes the ultimate point for hustling in the morning (which I love, waking up so early ‘n all) and it’s about the way you feel about yourself and your work throughout the day.

When you wake up an hour early, work on your business and have already made progress before others eat breakfast, how would you walk into work?

Probably like a peacock during mating season.

But when you want to work on your dream at night, all you can do during the day is to anxiously think about when you’ll finally be able to get back, counting the minutes, and focusing less on your day job.

Worst case, when a day at the office runs late you won’t have any time to hustle at all and end up feeling really down.

So put that achievement in your bank account in the mornings, where no one can take it away from you!

Lesson 3: Define what enough means to you before you reach it.

Lastly, Jon has a great tip about success.

Define what having enough means to you up front.

When you don’t spell out that $10k/month is enough for you, you’ll hustle right past it, and turn into a goal-chasing, never satisfied workaholic.

Success too has its downsides, one of them being the constant craving for more, so Jon set up an email to be sent to himself a year from now (here’s how), reminding him that all he needed was a wonderful family and a good job.

Do the same.

Write it down and have it sent to you.

Don’t get lost in all your goals. When you reach them, take a moment to step back, look around, see how far you’ve come and appreciate life.

After all, that’s what quitting your job is all about.

Quitter Review

I really want to sit down and binge read all books by Jon Acuff right now. I’ve only read excerpts so far, which is why I’m all the more glad that this summary on Blinkist was so good.

Quitter perfectly balances Jeff Goins’s The Art of Work, it grounds the inspiration and motivation you get from it in down-to-earth actionable steps to take next.

I’m setting up an email to myself with “enough” as I write this and suggest you read this combined with the above and So Good They Can’t Ignore You.

Great work, looking forward to more of Jon’s books both on Blinkist and in paperback 🙂

Who would I recommend the Quitter summary to?

The 24 year old ambitious upstart, who’s about to quit his day job for his entrepreneurial career, the 35 year old, who’s successful, but never sure when she’s reached her goal, and anyone who claims to be a night owl.

Last Updated on July 27, 2022

Rate this book!
This book has an average rating of 5 based on 1 votes.

Niklas Göke

Niklas Göke is an author and writer whose work has attracted tens of millions of readers to date. He is also the founder and CEO of Four Minute Books, a collection of over 1,000 free book summaries teaching readers 3 valuable lessons in just 4 minutes each. Born and raised in Germany, Nik also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration & Engineering from KIT Karlsruhe and a Master’s Degree in Management & Technology from the Technical University of Munich. He lives in Munich and enjoys a great slice of salami pizza almost as much as reading — or writing — the next book — or book summary, of course!