It is the season of Lent, in the Christian calendar, when we are encouraged to “give something up” until Easter. Traditionally people give up wine, or chocolate, or some other pleasure; I suppose the idea is to model moral rectitude through abstention.
But in my favorite sermon he ever preached, Steve suggested another kind of giving up for Lent. What if, he said, we give up something that is really hurting us?
Wouldn’t that be a better way to move through the wilderness time before Easter? To release something heavy, something hard to carry?
This was ten years ago, and I have never looked at Lent — or giving up — the same way again. Because while our culture likes to shout never give up, never give up, never ever ever ever ever give up, the truth is, if you want to flourish, you’ve got to be really good at giving up.
As Jonathan Weiner explains in his Pulitzer Prize–winning book, The Beak of the Finch, giving up is a critical strategy for birds trying to survive the Galapagos. The beak of the finch has evolved in a very specific way to extract food from a harsh environment… and it’s a tricky task. “When times are hard… (finch) lives depend on how efficiently they can forage for food—how little energy they can expend in getting how much energy in return.” The BigThink blog notes, “The finches that know when to give up and move on to another potential food source have a better chance of survival, because they’re not depleting themselves in a quest with diminishing nutritional returns.”
We like to say never ever ever ever ever give up, but sometimes, the opposite is also true. Sometimes, giving up is the best route to flourishing.
1. Give up self-flagellation
We all have ways that we yell at ourselves, critique ourselves. Mine presents as self-flagellation, a constant recurring shout of “You are not good enough.” For ages, I thought this voice was making more of me: it was helpful motivation inspiring me to improve! No, it wasn’t. It was just mean. I talked to myself in ways that I would never talk to anyone else, but for ages, I didn’t know I had a choice. I didn’t know I could give up being cruel to myself. But it turns out, with practice, I could, and I have worked hard to give up self-flagellation. It still comes up sometimes, when I’m feeling vulnerable; recently I had a conversation with a friend who was killing it in her career, and I hung up the phone, and the voice inside me rose up and said, “Man, Castellani, you are such a loser,” and I fell into that for a little while, but then I remembered, “Wait, I gave up self-flagellation,” and I stopped listening.
2. Give up being a perfect host
The first time Steve and I had a dinner party, in our early married days, I tried to make bouef bourginon, because, I guess, I thought I was supposed to be Julia Childs? I had never made bouef bourginon before, I don’t think I had ever made BEEF before, except for ground hamburger in casseroles, and after spending two days simmering and sauteeing and cultivating my stew, an hour before the guests were due to arrive, I opened up the slow cooker and… empty. The entire stew had simmered away. I had eight people coming for dinner, and I had a pot of dehydrated vegetables and shriveled gray chunks of something. I shrieked and started crying. Steve called his sister, a gifted French chef. She said “Put a stick of butter and a bottle of red wine in the pot, close the lid, it will be fine.” I did. It was. But it put me off throwing dinner parties! It took days of effort and a traumatic event! I was buying into the Nora Ephron model of dinner parties: you need a specialty recipe, and fancy place settings, and a thoughtfully curated guest list, and it has to be an event people will remember forever so they will write about you in the New York Times after you die. I knew I wasn’t Nora. Or Julia. So I was tempted to give up throwing dinner parties. I didn’t do it as often as I might have liked, and when I did, it was with so much stress and production.
But then Steve and I were invited over to dinner with a former ambassador to Zimbabwe. It was just the two of us, him and his wife. They grilled hamburgers, put out sides they had purchased at Trader Joe’s, and for dessert passed around pints of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, while we discussed the arc of industrialization from the printing press to the modern day, and how the sort of turmoil that we are experiencing in the world right now has always been the universal human response to breakthrough technologies. We had a fantastic time, and I thought, hey….
So this is what I’ve given up: trying to be Julia Childs, or Nora Ephron. I have adopted the strategy of the former ambassador from the State Department. Now, if I invite you over for a dinner party, we might grill salmon and supplement with takeout. I might spend two days making a pie, but I also might order Chinese food and spend two hours playing card games. We had friends stay with us this summer and on our first night, I announced that we were having a charcuterie platter on the deck. It was excellent, we rolled with it even after Lucy snatched some of the food for herself, and the next day we all laughed when we went to another friend’s house for lunch, and were served another charcuterie plate. It’s a trend! So. If you happen to be a Nora Ephron host, please invite me over, but if you’re more like me (or the ambassador to Zimbabwe), that’s fine too. Give up being perfect, so you can spend more time laughing with friends.
3. Give it up for greatness.
These are fun stories, but they’re actually grounded in research. If you want to be great, you’ve got to give up. In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins notes that one of the most unexpected features of successful companies is that they’re really terrible at something. It’s simple math. There are only 24 hours in a day, there are only so many resources at your disposal, and if you try to do everything, you will end up doing everything average. The most successful companies — and the most successful people — are those who are willing to be bad at something, so they can be great at something else.
When I started a Health Care Public Relations practice at Porter Novelli, I decided we should be really bad at… public relations. It was a bold choice! But I had come from the field of advertising, not PR; I was starting a Public Relations firm having never worked in PR before. And my early teammates were the same; we were from all different kinds of fields, none of us with a background in traditional media relations. Moreover, there were a ton of really good Health Care PR teams out in the marketplace. We decided that we would be the team you called when you wanted to do something a bit different. We would focus on causes, my team decided, and we would focus on non-traditional kinds of interventions. We started coming up with creative ways to solve client problems, and instead of trying to cover up what felt like a big hole in my skillset (“Hi, I’m running a PR practice, but I don’t actually know anything about PR,”), it became our core selling point.
We did great, and it started with giving up. We gave up being good at traditional PR, and we became great at finding unexpected solutions. We had a blast.
Cal Newport, in his new book Slow Productivity, talks about the power of giving up, also. He has a three-step model for flourishing in a new world order, and step one is, essentially, give up. Or, as he puts it, do less. Cal Newport, like me, believes we are living in a world that is constantly singing one song:
More, more, more, more.
More, and also more, and then some more.
Faster, faster, faster, still.
More and more and more and more until.
If you’re thinking, that is a terrible song, then yes, I agree with you. It’s terrible! But we’re all singing it.
So, Cal suggests, the first way to make the world better, the first way to make your life better, one great step toward flourishing, is to do less.
It’s still Lent, for those who observe. But even it you don’t, there’s still time for you to give something up. Give up being a perfect host, and just have fun with friends. Give up wishing you were smarter or more successful, and just accept who you are. Give up the belief that you need to be extraordinary, because you already are. Give up writing a perfect substack essay!
Just give up.
And see what happens next.
And again it's time to give (it) up for Robin!!!!!!!