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

by Seth Godin

I FEEL LIKE GIVING UP. Almost every day, in fact. Not all day, of course, but there are moments.

Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.

Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other.

With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top.

Faced with an infinite number of choices, many people pick the market leader.

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.

How often do you hope that your accountant is a safe driver and a decent golfer?

In a free market, we reward the exceptional.

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.

The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery.

Stick with the Dips that are likely to pan out, and quit the Cul-de-Sacs to focus your resources.

In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition.

When Jack Welch remade GE, the most fabled decision he made was this: If we can’t be #1 or #2 in an industry, we must get out.

The next time you’re tempted to vilify a particularly obnoxious customer or agency or search engine, realize that this failed interaction is the best thing that’s happened to you all day long. Without it, you’d be easily replaceable. The Dip is your very best friend.

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.

The time and effort and cost of ramping up your operation create the Dip.

But the Dip hits when you need to upgrade to a professional sales force and scale it up. In almost every field, the competitor that’s first with a big, aggressive sales force has a huge advantage.

Successful entrepreneurs understand the difference between investing to get through the Dip (a smart move) or investing in something that’s actually a risky crapshoot.

Those shortsighted people who are always eager for a favor or a break never manage to get through the relationship Dip, because they didn’t invest in relationships back when it was difficult (but not urgent).

Because day to day, it’s easier to stick with something that we’re used to, that doesn’t make too many waves, that doesn’t hurt.

If you can get through the Dip, if you can keep going when the system is expecting you to stop, you will achieve extraordinary results. People who make it through the Dip are scarce indeed, so they generate more value.

Even more important, you can realize that quitting the stuff you don’t care about or the stuff you’re mediocre at or better yet quitting the Cul-de-Sacs frees up your resources to obsess about the Dips that matter.

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.

A well-reported study (probably apocryphal) found that the typical salesperson gives up after the fifth contact with a prospect. After five times, the salesperson figures she’s wasting her time and the prospect’s, quits, and moves on. Of course, the study reports that 80 percent of these customers buy on the seventh attempt to close the sale. If only the salesperson had stuck it out!

Selling is about a transference of emotion, not a presentation of facts. If it were just a presentation of facts, then a PDF flyer or a Web site would be sufficient to make the phone ring.

Yes, you should (you must) quit a product or a feature or a design—you need to do it regularly if you’re going to grow and have the resources to invest in the right businesses. But no, you mustn’t quit a market or a strategy or a niche.

Your strategy—to be a trusted source in your chosen market—can survive even if your product is canceled.

No, the opposite of quitting is rededication. The opposite of quitting is an invigorated new strategy designed to break the problem apart.

Short-term pain has more impact on most people than long-term benefits do, which is why it’s so important for you to amplify the long-term benefits of not quitting. You need to remind yourself of life at the other end of the Dip because it’s easier to overcome the pain of yet another unsuccessful cold call if the reality of a successful sales career is more concrete.

Is the pain of the Dip worth the benefit of the light at the end of the tunnel?

The problem with coping is that it never leads to exceptional performance.

“Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment.” Now that’s good advice.

The best quitters, as we’ve seen, are the ones who decide in advance when they’re going to quit.

Quitting Before You Start Here’s an assignment for you: Write it down. Write down under what circumstances you’re willing to quit. And when. And then stick with

If you enter a market that’s too big or too loud for the amount of resources you have available, your message is going to get lost.

If I quit this task, will it increase my ability to get through the Dip on something more important?