In the United States, endurance is a virtue valued above all else. It’s a foundation of the American dream, the belief that through determination anyone can achieve anything. And while not a bad ideal by itself, somehow society has also accepted that the opposite is true — that quitting guarantees failure.

As high school students, we are often the most susceptible to this way of thinking. We’ve all stuck with things we hated for years simply because of the faults associated with being a quitter.

However, quitting — especially in high school — is sometimes the best course of action, contrary to the sign of laziness or emotional weakness that it’s stereotypically believed to be.

In order to improve in anything, one first has to accept that the current state of things is not perfect — that it can be improved upon. This principle seems so obvious in school or sports. We go to school and learn because we know that our current understanding of the world isn’t perfect. We exercise because the current state of our body isn’t perfect.

Somehow, when it comes to deciding what we spend time on, we don’t acknowledge imperfection or have any desire to improve. This isn’t about trivial things like watching movies or scrolling online — this is about the activities we put effort and focus into, day after day. All too often, we endure activities that we don’t enjoy or don’t improve in simply out of habit.

In being more open to quitting things, we are acknowledging that the way we spend our time can be improved. In an article for The New York Times, MIT professor Sendhil Mullainathan wrote that “experimentation is an act of humility, an acknowledgment that there is simply no way of knowing without trying something different.”

Though the act of quitting is a risk, and therefore admittedly scary, it’s usually the only way to experiment with figuring out how to spend our time. And as high school students, it’s ridiculous to think that we have it all figured out.

In addition to this fear comes the psychological phenomenon known as the sunk-cost fallacy. The fallacy (so called because it’s completely illogical) describes an all too common action that people take: continuing with something pointless or unpleasant simply because of past investment in the activity. Although you shouldn’t give up after every little hiccup, if something is consistently unrewarding, perhaps it’s best to move on and experiment with a different activity.

Quitting shouldn’t immediately be thought of negatively, or as a sign of defeat. It’s not permanent. Though it is a change, it can also provide some distance and a space for reflection. It allows us to compare how we feel both with and without a given activity in our life. It’s never too late to try new things, but it’s also never too late to quit.