Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

by Annie Duke

Persistence is not always the best decision, certainly not absent context. And context changes.

That’s the funny thing about grit. While grit can get you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, grit can also get you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile. The trick is in figuring out the difference.

By definition, anybody who has succeeded at something has stuck with it. That’s a statement of fact, always true in hindsight. But that doesn’t mean that the inverse is true, that if you stick to something, you will succeed at it.

Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.

I’m not giving up! I’m just starting a new chapter.”

stripped of its negative connotation, quitting is merely the choice to stop something that you have started.

Quitting is ultimately a forecasting problem, meaning that when to quit is a problem of whether the future looks dire, not whether the present is dire.

when the world gives us bad news we tend to persevere too long, but when we get good news, we tend to quit too soon.

Success is not achieved by quitting things just because they are hard. But success is also not achieved by sticking to hard things that are not worthwhile.

making a plan for when to quit should be done long before you are facing the quitting decision. It recognizes, as Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, that the worst time to make a decision is when you’re “in it.”

There is no doubt that quitting is an important decision-making skill. Getting the decision right is sometimes a matter of life or death.

That’s why, if I had to skill somebody up to get them to be a better decision-maker, quitting is the primary skill I would choose, because the option to quit is what allows you to react to that changing landscape.

The road to sustained profitability for a business is not only about sticking to a strategy or business model (even one that has been profitable in the past). It is also about surveying and reacting to the changing landscape. Similarly, for each of us on an individual level, the road to happiness is not in sticking blindly to the thing that we’re doing, as so many aphorisms cajole us to do. We need to see what’s going on around us so we can do whatever will maximize our happiness and our time and our well-being.

Decision-making in the real world requires action without complete information. Quitting is the tool that allows us to react to new information that is revealed after we make a decision.

Sticking with a course of action is the only way to find out for sure how it will turn out. Quitting requires being okay with not knowing what might have been.

Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early. If you quit on time, it’s not going to seem like anything particularly dire is happening at that particular moment.

the worst time to make a decision is when you’re in it.

There is a well-known heuristic in management consulting that the right time to fire someone is the first time it crosses your mind.

If you stick to a path that is no longer worth pursuing, whether it’s a relationship that isn’t going well, or a stock that you’re invested in that’s losing money, or an employee that you’ve hired who isn’t performing, that is when you lose ground.

Contrary to popular belief, quitting will get you to where you want to go faster.

expected value is a helpful concept for determining whether the path you are on is worth sticking to.

“Imagine it’s a year from now and you stayed in the job that you’re currently at—what’s the probability you’re going to be unhappy at the end of that year?”

When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call.

If you feel like you’ve got a close call between quitting and persevering, it’s likely that quitting is the better choice.

One of the key findings of prospect theory is loss aversion, recognizing that the emotional impact of a loss is greater than the corresponding impact of an equivalent gain. In fact, losing feels about two times as bad to us as winning feels good to us.

A key finding of prospect theory is loss aversion, the phenomenon whereby the emotional impact of a loss is greater than the corresponding impact of an equivalent gain.

“Intuitively, one would expect individuals to reverse decisions or to change behaviors which result in negative consequences.”

When we are in the losses, we are not only more likely to stick to a losing course of action, but also to double down. This tendency is called escalation of commitment.

sunk cost effect as a general phenomenon, describing it as a systematic cognitive error in which people take into account money, time, effort, or any other resources they have previously sunk into an endeavor when making decisions about whether to continue and spend more.

Put simply, the sunk cost effect causes people to stick in situations that they ought to be quitting.

A relationship that’s not working out turns into a game of Katamari. Your friend complains about being in a bad relationship. If you ask, “Why don’t you just break up?” they’ll frequently say, “Because I’ve put so much time into trying to make this relationship work.”

There’s a saying among top poker players that poker is one long game.

The sunk cost effect is a cognitive illusion where people take into account resources they have previously sunk into an endeavor when making decisions about whether to continue and spend more.

When deciding whether to stick or quit, we are worried that if we walk away, we will have wasted the resources we have spent in the trying.

Sunk costs snowball, like a katamari. The resources you have already spent make it less likely you will quit, which makes it more likely you will accumulate additional sunk costs, which makes it again less likely you will quit, and so on. The growing debris of your prior commitment makes it increasingly harder to walk away.

You can’t trick yourself into not taking sunk costs into account by trying to view the situation as a new choice.

Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress.

Monkeys and pedestals is a mental model that helps you quit sooner. Pedestals are the part of the problem you know you can already solve, like designing the perfect business card or logo. The hardest thing is training the monkey. When faced with a complex, ambitious goal, (a) identify the hard thing first; (b) try to solve for that as quickly as possible; and (c) beware of false progress.

When we butt up against a hard problem we can’t solve, we have a tendency to turn to pedestal-building rather than choosing to quit.

Advance planning and precommitment contracts increase the chances you will quit sooner.

When you enter into a course of action, create a set of kill criteria. This is a list of signals you might see in the future that would tell you it’s time to quit. Kill criteria will help inoculate you against bad decision-making when you’re “in it” by limiting the number of decis...

The endowment effect is a cognitive bias where we value something we own more than we would if we didn’t own it.

We are more tolerant of bad outcomes that come from sticking with what we are already doing than bad outcomes that come from switching to something new. This phenomenon is part of omission-commission bias.

When you say, “I’m just not ready to decide yet,” what you are really saying is, “For now, I am choosing the status quo.”

When it comes to quitting, the most painful thing to quit is who you are. Our ideas, beliefs, and actions are part of our identity.

Dissonance can also result from new information coming into conflict with our past actions.

We also want others to view us as consistent. We worry that if others see inconsistency between our present and past decisions, beliefs, or actions, they will judge us as being wrong, irrational, capricious, and prone to mistakes.

Optimism makes you less likely to walk away while not actually increasing your chances of success.

Life’s too short to spend your time on opportunities that are no longer worthwhile.