The Dip: The extraordinary benefits of knowing when to quit (and when to stick)

by Seth Godin

Sometimes we get discouraged and turn to inspirational writing, like stuff from Vince Lombardi: “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” Bad advice. Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.

Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most. Extraordinary benefits also accrue to the tiny majority with the guts to quit early and refocus their efforts on something new.

Believe it or not, quitting is often a great strategy, a smart way to manage your life and your career.

Our culture celebrates superstars. We reward the product or the song or the organization or the employee that is number one. The rewards are heavily skewed, so much so that it’s typical for #1 to get ten times the benefit of #10, and a hundred times the benefit of #100.

You’d be forgiven if you assumed, as you assume with most lists, that the top-ranked flavors did a little bit better than the others. But here’s what the distribution really looked like:

hockey stick

It’s always like this (almost always, anyway). It’s called Zipf’s law, and it applies to résumés and college application rates and best-selling records and everything in between. Winners win big because the marketplace loves a winner.

If you’ve read Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail, this isn’t news to you.

People don’t have a lot of time and don’t want to take a lot of risks. If you’ve been diagnosed with cancer of the navel, you’re not going to mess around by going to a lot of doctors. You’re going to head straight for the “top guy,” the person who’s ranked the best in the world. Why screw around if you get only one chance?

There are hundreds of brands of bottled water, and they’re all mostly the same. So we don’t shop around for bottled water. There is no top for bottled water. Champagne is a different story. Dom Pérignon is at or near the top, so we pay extra for it.

The mass market is dying. There is no longer one best song or one best kind of coffee. Now there are a million micromarkets, but each micromarket still has a best. If your micromarket is “organic markets in Tulsa,” then that’s your world. And being the best in that world is the place to be.

pokemon master in Sderot

So while it’s more important than ever to be the best in the world, it’s also easier—if you pick the right thing and do it all the way.

Web sites highlighted on Digg still get a hundred times as much traffic as ordinary sites.

Or do they

People settle. They settle for less than they are capable of. Organizations settle too. For good enough instead of best in the world. If you’re not going to put in the effort to be my best possible choice, why bother?

Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success.

The people who skip the hard questions are in the majority, but they are not in demand.

Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations. Reactive quitting and serial quitting are the bane of those that strive (and fail) to get what they want. And most people do just that. They quit when it’s painful and stick when they can’t be bothered to quit.

Almost everything in life worth doing is controlled by the Dip. It looks like this:

Just because you know you’re in the Dip doesn’t mean you have to live happily with it. Dips don’t last quite as long when you whittle at them.

The Cul-de-Sac (French for “dead end”) is so simple it doesn’t even need a chart. It’s a situation where you work and you work and you work and nothing much changes. It doesn’t get a lot better, it doesn’t get a lot worse. It just is.

The Cul-de-Sac and the Cliff Are the Curves That Lead to Failure If you find yourself facing either of these two curves, you need to quit. Not soon, but right now. The biggest obstacle to success in life, as far as I can tell, is our inability to quit these curves soon enough.

The brave thing to do is to tough it out and end up on the other side—getting all the benefits that come from scarcity. The mature thing is not even to bother starting to snowboard because you’re probably not going to make it through the Dip. And the stupid thing to do is to start, give it your best shot, waste a lot of time and money, and quit right in the middle of the Dip.

I was making stupid decisions.. Actually not was - still am

In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition. If that adversity also causes you to quit, though, it’s all for nothing.

You’ve acquired the equipment and the education and the reputation … all so you can confront this Dip, right now. The Dip is the reason you’re here. It’s not enough to survive your way through this Dip. You get what you deserve when you embrace the Dip and treat it like the opportunity that it really is.

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner. Before you enter a new market, consider what would happen if you managed to get through the Dip and win in the market you’re already in.

Quitting is difficult. Quitting requires you to acknowledge that you’re never going to be #1 in the world. At least not at this. So it’s easier just to put it off, not admit it, settle for mediocre.

It’s human nature to quit when it hurts. But it’s that reflex that creates scarcity. The challenge is simple: Quitting when you hit the Dip is a bad idea. If the journey you started was worth doing, then quitting when you hit the Dip just wastes the time you’ve already invested. Quit in the Dip often enough and you’ll find yourself becoming a serial quitter, starting many things but accomplishing little. Simple: If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start. If you can embrace that simple rule, you’ll be a lot choosier about which journeys you start.

A superstar is the best in the world at what she does. If you want to be a superstar, then you need to find a field with a steep Dip—a barrier between those who try and those who succeed. And you’ve got to get through that Dip to the other side. This isn’t for everyone. If it were, there’d be no superstars. If you choose this path, it’s because you realize that there’s a Dip, and you believe you can get through it. The Dip is actually your greatest ally because it makes the project worthwhile (and keeps others from competing with you). But wait, that’s not enough. Not only do you need to find a Dip that you can conquer but you also need to quit all the Cul-de-Sacs that you’re currently idling your way through. You must quit the projects and investments and endeavors that don’t offer you the same opportunity. It’s difficult, but it’s vitally important.

For example, lots of people sign up for a health-club membership (having a lot of members lets the club keep rates reasonable), but the club itself is small because very few people actually come frequently after they join. That’s built into the system. If everyone who joined came, you’d never be able to find an empty bike or to afford a membership.

Explaining without explaining here

EDUCATION DIP—A career gets started as soon as you leave school. But the Dip often hits when it’s time to go learn something new, to reinvent or rebuild your skills. A doctor who sacrifices a year of her life for a specialty reaps the rewards for decades afterward.

Microsoft does it. They’ve built so many relationships and established so many standards that it’s essentially inconceivable that someone will challenge Word or Excel—at least until the platform changes. Intuit made it through the Dip, though, and now their Quicken accounting software is just as secure as Word is as a word processor. Make it through the competition’s barriers and you get to be king for a while. “But wait!” you say. “Isn’t Google going hard after Micro -soft by creating Web-based versions of spreadsheets and word processors?” Yes. But even mighty Google knows that they can’t do that without changing the platform (from the PC to the Web). Microsoft has constructed a Dip so deep and so expensive that it’s impossible to cross. But now, with a new platform, Google has a much easier path to follow. Apple’s done the same thing with iTunes and the iPod.

You grew up believing that quitting is a moral failing. Quitting feels like a go-down moment, a moment where you look yourself in the eye and blink. Of course you are trying your best.

The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.

The sad news is that when you start over, you get very little credit for how long you stood in line with your last great venture.

Job seekers face the Dip because human resources departments support it. HR doesn’t show up at your door and offer you a job. They set hurdles (like submitting a résumé or wearing a suit or flying to Cleveland) as a way of screening out the folks who aren’t actually serious about a job. We’re seduced by the tales of actresses being discovered at the local drugstore, or a classmate who got a fantastic job just by showing up at the college placement office. We see an author hit the big time after just one appearance on Oprah or a rock band getting signed after submitting a demo—it all seems easy and exciting.

It’s easy to be seduced by the new money and the rush to the fresh. The problem is that this leads to both an addiction and a very short attention span. If it doesn’t work today, the thinking goes, why should I wait around until tomorrow? The problem is that only a tiny portion of the audience is looking for the brand-new thing. Most people are waiting for the tested, the authenticated, and the proven.

Godot???

David found himself stuck in a dead-end job at the end of a long career at one company, and he was ready to quit. His boss was a disaster, the work wasn’t adding any value to his résumé or his day, and he was unhappy. David went for broke. He had a meeting with his boss and his boss’s boss (quite a no-no) and calmly explained his problem. He said that he figured he’d end up quitting, but he liked the company so much he wanted to propose an alternative. So he did.

When a kid drops out of football or karate, it’s not because she’s carefully considered the long-term consequences of her action. She does it because her coach keeps yelling at her, and it’s not fun. It’s better to stop.

Richard Nixon sacrificed tens of thousands of innocent lives (on both sides) when he refused to quit the Vietnam war. The only reason he didn’t quit sooner: pride. The very same pride that keeps someone in the same career years after it has become unattractive and no fun. The very same pride that keeps a restaurant open long after it’s clear that business is just not going to pick up.

Best-selling author Michael Crichton quit as he was on his way to a career at the top of his profession. When he gave up medicine, Crichton had already graduated from Harvard Medical School and done a postdoctoral fellowship study at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, guaranteeing him a lucrative career as a doctor or as a researcher. He traded it for the unpredictable life of an author.

Quitting when you’re panicked is dangerous and expensive. The best quitters, as we’ve seen, are the ones who decide in advance when they’re going to quit. You can always quit later—so wait until you’re done panicking to decide.