I'm not talking about his graceful yet skeletal dance moves: 'The Dip' happens to be a thing. Bowie is also a thing, a kind of Minotaur-type thing, but we'll get to that later. The Dip is a book. (A little book that teaches you when to quit and when to stick.) It is also a new-fangaled noun coined by Mr. Seth Godin, the marketing guru of now. What is "The Dip" you ask? He says,
"It's the fifth job interview where they never even call you back.
It's the garage band playing to an empty club in the middle of nowhere.
It's the middle of the marathon, when the excitement of the starting gun is a dim memory, and the joy of the finish line is a distant dream.
It's any rough patch you have to get through before achieving your big goal... if in fact you're chasing the right goal."
So basically, it's a tough situation, but remember the most important part - it has a bright and shiny looking pay-off. Whether that pay-off is in sight or not, 'The Dip' happens when people start to question, doubt, and consider taking up that four-letter-word we've been taught to hate:
QUIT.
Let us now delve into a nerdy metaphor: It's 1986. Jim Henson has just directed the stoner [yes stoner]/ childhood cinema classic, The Labyrinth starring the tight-panted one himself, David Bowie. A tale of fantasy a la Alice in Wonderland with a twisted pedophiliac twist.
ps. twist
Our heroine Sarah [Jennifer Connolly] is navigating a shape-shifty labyrinth to the castle where she must save her baby step-brother from the creepy goblin King [Bowie]. After a series of mini-successes, she falls into an 'Oubliette' - a place with no doors or exits. One the labyrinth dwellers, Hoggle, is inside this cavern of what seems to be doom. He tries to deter her from reaching the castle, but she, the astute adventurer, knows that this is just 'The Dip' and says, "No! I'm not giving up now. I've come too far."
Sarah then climbs her way out of 'The Dip'. She rips the heads off some nonsensical muppets, tip toes around the bog of eternal stench whilst keeping her rad fairy gear tidy & clean. She even fights of a pretty harsh "poisoning" where creepiness is taken to a new level. [pictured above] In the end, she saves her step-brother.
Godin teaches us, if we have the perceptiveness to distinguish 'The Dip' it makes it easier to push through it. Sarah knew this was a worthy journey, and saving her brother was a success she couldn't give up on.
Even if your antagonist is David Bowie, there is always a way through 'The Dip'. This applies to careers, relationships, body-building, pretty much anything that is hard in life.
But there must be situations when quitting is necessary? This must be true otherwise we'd all be dating our grade 9 boyfriend working at Burger King. Godin laments on those 'not-worth-it' situations he calls "Cul-de-sacs". These are the soul-draining situations that are not worth wasting your breath on.
Here are some 18+ words your mother would have never told you:
"You're astonishing. How dare you waste it. How dare you squander that resource by spreading it too thin. How dare you settle for mediocre just because you're busy coping with too many things on your agenda, racing against the clock to get it all done. The lesson is simple: If you've got as much as you've got, use it. Use it to become the best in the world, to change the game, to set the agenda for everyone else. You can only do that by marshaling all of your resources to get through the biggest possible Dip. In order to get through that Dip, you'll need to quit everything else. If it's not going to put a dent in the world, quit. Right now. Quit and use that void to find the energy to assault the Dip that matters."
- Seth Godin
