Going home

Tao Yuanming was a poet from a poor aristocratic family in the Jin dynasty. He took a position as a county magistrate and quit after about eighty days.

The reason is famous. A superior official was due to inspect the county, and the staff told him to dress properly and be ready to bow to it. He said: I can't bend my back for a sack of rice and be servile to some country bumpkin.

The rice was his salary. The sack of rice is the whole phrase in Chinese now, meaning to sell your dignity for a wage.

He wrote the piece on the way home. The boat drifts, the wind is soft, and then: the way home, let me go home. The fields will go to weeds if I wait. The first thing he does when he gets there is look at the pines and chrysanthemums in his yard. He's relieved. Then he notices his clothes are dirty and there's a pot of wine and it's fine.

There is a cost. He was poor. The household was poor. Some of his poems about the years after are quite hungry.

The honest version of this story is not that quitting works. It's that he named the price before he paid it, and then paid it without pretending it wasn't a price.

That's the part worth copying. Not the exit. The clear accounting before it, including what you'd lose.

MOJOWAY asks a client to price the change before recommending it. Anyone can quit a job. Knowing what the following winter costs is what makes the decision a grown-up one.