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“This brilliant and entertaining book documents a major flaw in human actions and decisions: the bias against quitting.
—Shane Parrish, host of The Knowledge Project podcast
—Philip Tetlock, bestselling author of Superforecasting
Grit vs. Quit
By definition, anybody who has succeeded at something has stuck with it. That’s a statement of fact, always true in hindsight.
We ought not confuse hindsight with foresight, which is what these aphorisms do.
There is a rich universe of science studying the human tendency to persevere too long, particularly in the face of bad news. The science spans disciplines from economics to game theory to behavioral psychology and covers topics from sunk cost to status quo bias to loss aversion to escalation of commitment, and much more.
Section I will make the case for quitting as a decision skill worth developing.
Chapter 2 explores why, when you quit on time, it usually feels like you quit too early.
Chapter 3 will dive into the science of quitting, showcasing the evidence that we all tend to poorly calibrate our grit/quit decisions: In particular, 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.
In Section IV, I examine the problem of opportunity cost. Whenever we commit to a course of action, by default we are committing to not pursuing other things.
Chapter 11 looks at the downside of goals, arguing that although goals are a motivating force, they can also motivate you to stick to things that are no longer worthwhile. The pass-fail nature of goals is at odds with an unfixed and flexible world, and the desire to meet a goal can keep us from seeing other paths and opportunities available to us. I’ll also argue for why every goal needs caveats, as well as progress markers along the way.
Turnaround times are there to prevent people from making poor decisions to keep going when they’re in the shadow of the summit, building into a climbing plan three crucial concepts. The first is that persistence is not always a virtue.
The second is that 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
Third, and perhaps most important, the turnaround time is a reminder that the real
goal in climbing Everest is not to reach the summit. It is, understandably, the focus of enormous attention, but the ultimate goal, in the broadest, most realistic sense, is to return safely to the base of the mountain.
Just imagine if any decision you made was last and final. Whatever you decide, you would have to stick with it for the rest of your life. Think of how certain you would have to be before you could ever make a choice to start anything. Imagine if you had to marry the first person you ever went on a date with.
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,
Any decision is, of course, made under some degree of uncertainty, stemming from two different sources, most of our decisions being subject to both.
First, the world is stochastic.
Second, when we make most decisions, we don’t have all the facts. Because we’re not omniscient, we have to make decisions with only partial information, certainly far less than we’d need to have to make a perfect choice.
That being said, after you’ve set out on a particular course of action, new information will reveal itself to you. And that information is critical feedback.
A simple example we all use is dating, which is a version of MVP. You need to know much less about a person you’re going to go on a date with than a person you’re going to marry because you can easily choose never to see your date again. In addition, all those dates help you reveal and refine your preferences and make your decisions about long-term relationships much better.
When you are weighing whether to quit something or stick with it, you can’t know for sure whether you can succeed at what you’re doing because that’s probabilistic. But there is a crucial difference between the two choices. Only one choice—the choice to persevere—lets you eventually find out the answer. The desire for certainty is the siren song calling us to persevere, because perseverance is the only path to knowing for sure how things
will turn out if you stay the course. If you choose to quit, you will always be left to wonder, “What if?” Just as the Sirens of mythology lured sailors toward their song, we are lured to persevering because we want to know. It’s the only way to avoid those “what ifs.”
When Tom Brady won his seventh Super Bowl in 2021, it was another reminder not just of his excellence but also of the astonishing length of his career. In fact, scanning a list of the advertisers from Brady’s first Super Bowl back in 2002, nineteen years earlier, you can see that Brady also outlasted many once successful and very prominent companies. The list is now a virtual corporate graveyard: AOL, Blockbuster, Circuit City, CompUSA, Gateway, RadioShack, and Sears.
Blockbuster, when presented with the opportunity to acquire Netflix, refused. Then, it persisted in its business of renting physical copies of entertainment content to people coming in person to their store locations.
As Kenny Rogers sang in The Gambler, “You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” Notice that three of those four things are about quitting. When it comes to the importance of cutting your losses at poker, Kenny Rogers got it.
This is the fundamental truth about grit and quit: The opposite of a great virtue is also a great virtue.
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 Usually Feels Like Quitting Too Early
Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early.
Thinking in Expected Value
Expected value (or EV) helps you answer two questions. First, it tells you whether any option you are considering is going to be, on balance, positive or negative for you in the long run. Second, it allows you to compare different options to figure out which is the better choice, the better choice being simply the one that carries the highest expected value.
“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?” She said, “I know I’m going to be unhappy, one hundred percent.” I followed up by asking, “If it’s a year from now and you switched to this new job you’re considering, what’s the probability you’re
going to be unhappy?” She said, “Well, I’m not sure.” “Is it one hundred percent?” She said, “Definitely not.”
All that I had done was to reframe her quitting decision as an expected-value problem.
But this isn’t what Levitt found. When he followed up with the coin flippers two and six months later, he discovered that for the big life decisions, people who quit were happier on average than people who stuck, whether they quit on their own or after the coin flipped in favor of quitting.
Underscoring that point, Levitt concluded, “The results of this paper suggest that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.”
If you feel like you’ve got a close call between quitting and persevering, it’s likely that quitting is the better choice.
Thinking in expected value helps you figure out if the path you are on is worth sticking to. EV is not just about money. It can be measured in health, well-being, happiness, time, self-fulfillment, satisfaction in relationships, or anything else that affects you. If you feel like the choice between persevering and walking away is a close call, it’s likely that quitting is the better choice.
In the century or so between Henry Ford’s development of mass production for automobiles and the development of ridesharing apps, taxicab drivers were the forebears of “the gig economy.” The majority of cab drivers have always been independent contractors. They don’t make an hourly wage. Unless they own their own medallion, they are renting the cab, paying a fixed fee per twelve hours.
We are like the cab driver. The gig economy.
Colin Camerer,
Instead of maximizing their driving time when fares were plentiful and minimizing their unproductive time, they were likely to quit early when there was a lot of demand for their services. When there were few fares, they’d work the full twelve hours, wearing themselves out driving around for little benefit.
They discovered that the drivers set a daily goal for how much they wanted to earn and used that to determine when to stop working, ignoring the more useful information about earning conditions they discovered during their daily shift.
It seems very clear that the cab drivers were not thinking in expected value.
Up to this point, we have been focused on how quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early.
That’s what Steven Levitt’s work tells us. But the cab drivers show us that there are specific circumstances under which we do actually quit too early, when we aren’t gritty enough.
Their 1979 paper described what has become a cornerstone of behavioral economics, prospect theory.
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.
