I'm a Dropout Now (and that's fine)

Today I became a dropout. Not of school or anything doing with my profession though. Let me explain...

One of my hobbies is wine. It started when one of my friends took me out to some nearby vineyards (north fork of Long Island). At the time, I wasn't a fan of drinking because I had just seen it at loud parties that weren't my scene. He introduced me to a world of sitting around and enjoying wines with different notes while relaxing in a cool setting. I was hooked and have enjoyed learning more about it.

Pictured: The red stuff.

Not too long ago, I hit a bit of a plateau. I realized that I knew a good amount about wine for an amateur, but there was still quite a ways to go. So, I decided to enroll myself into a course.

I didn't pick just any course, I decided to go big. I enrolled in an introductory course to become a certified sommelier. I figured this would give me a better appreciation for wine and that I would learn more things to look for.

After a ten hour day at my first class, I realized that I was in too deep. The course was meant for people who wanted to go into wine professionally. Though we went over winemaking steps and what to look for when tasting wine, the vast majority of the day was spent going over sub-regions of wine producing places in the world in a level of detail I was not expecting for an intro course.

Pictured: The thing I was trying to get.

There were some cool things I learned. For example, in 1985, the German wine market exports plummeted. What had happened was that some vineyards were using diethylene glycol (a sweetening agent) to round out the taste of their wines. Once people found out, the wine community was shocked - equating what was happening to adding antifreeze to their wine. And this was partially true, the chemical was used industrially for this purpose (though, typically, antifreeze is ethaline glycol, a related but different chemical). The German wine market has only started coming back recently.

But as I was sitting there, I realized that I simply did not care about learning all of the famous chateaus in Bordeaux. What I was there for was different from what they were teaching.

So, for the next day, I simply didn't show up. And I'm okay with that. I feel like I got what I wanted from the course, though there was no way I was going to pass the exam they were going to put us through. I learned about more things to look at when drinking and choosing wine. That's what I went there for. So I don't see this as a bad thing; I accomplished what I set out to do.

Taking this into more of a macro level, we are taught from a young age that it is a bad thing to give up. And sometimes this is true, there are things we should not give up on without a really important reason for doing so. But sometimes, there is a compelling reason for doing so. I remember being told that, unless you are the star of a Rocky movie, giving up can be a strategic and correct thing to do. Sometimes the costs of moving forward are simply too great and the best move is to stop.

This is particularly true for hobbies. The entire point of them is to have fun. And sometimes, we get to a point that they stop being fun. So quit. There's nothing stopping you from doing so.