Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

by Annie Duke

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.

W. C. Fields: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no use being a damn fool about it.”

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

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.

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.

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.

Admittedly, “poltroon” is an obscure word now, but it’s a synonym for quitter that used to be quite popular, sufficiently nasty that if you called someone a poltroon, they were within their rights to challenge you to a duel.

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.

First, the world is stochastic. That’s just a fancy way of saying that luck makes it difficult to predict exactly how things will turn out, at least not in the short run.

On November 14, Butterfield came up with a code name for the tool, based on the acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.” Slack.

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

When thinking in expected value, the first step is to ask, “Does the course of action I’m considering (either a new course of action or continuing what you’re currently doing) have a positive expected value?” The second step is to compare that expected value with the expected value of other options you might be considering.

Winning poker players aren’t thinking about trying to win a single hand, come what may. They know that while any two cards can win, only some hands can win enough of the time to make them worth pursuing. Poker players are making decisions based on whether playing or folding will have the greater expected value. In other words, if they played the hand out over and over again, which choice (staying or folding) would be the more profitable decision in the long run?

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

The definitive instance they identified was from the classic, beloved TV series Happy Days, which first aired in January 1974. At the show’s peak, it had over thirty million viewers. Hein and Connolly decided Happy Days jumped the shark in episode 91 (season 5, in September 1977), when, famously, Fonzie, a character who was the leather-jacketed embodiment of cool, literally jumped over a shark.

In hindsight, we can see when someone has waited too long to quit, and we tend to be harsh in our judgment of those people. But when someone quits before it seems obvious to others, we mock them for quitting too early. That’s the quitting bind.

Prospect theory is a model of how people make decisions, accounting for systematic preferences and biases involving risk, uncertainty, gains, and losses.

When we’re choosing among new options, loss aversion causes us to favor the ones that have the lowest absolute loss associated with them, even if those options come at a lower expected value. In other words, our aversion to taking a loss causes us to make decisions a rational actor would not.

Sure-loss aversion makes us not want to stop something we have already started. That is because the only way to make sure we turn those paper losses into realized losses is to quit and refuse the gamble. Taking the option to flip the coin opens up the possibility of avoiding having to do that.

If you are in a situation that carries with it a negative expected value, by all means quit. But keep going when you have a positive expected value.

The war years had been good for LA, a center for defense production.

Psychologists Jeffrey Rubin and Joel Brockner conducted an amusing experiment to answer two questions: How long will people wait for something that never arrives, and what price will they pay to continue waiting? It turns out people will wait a surprisingly long amount of time, and they will pay an amount that clearly exceeds the value of what they were waiting for.

The sooner you figure out that you should walk away, the sooner you can switch to something better. And the sooner that happens, the more resources you’re saving, which you can then devote to more fruitful endeavors.

When you are doing something that you already know you can accomplish, you’re not learning anything important about whether the endeavor is worth pursuing.

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

One of the clearest examples of a kill criterion is the turnaround time on Everest. If you haven’t made it to the summit by 1 p.m., you cannot safely descend to Camp 4 before dark, so you must abandon the climb.

Essentially, kill criteria create a precommitment contract to quit.

When we own something, we value it more highly than an identical item that we do not own. Richard Thaler was the first to name this cognitive illusion, calling it the endowment effect.

John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, summed up this phenomenon well when he said, “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.”

But omission-commission bias causes us not to view these decisions as equivalent. That’s why we accept that explanation of “I’m not ready to make a decision yet” from others and why we accept it from ourselves. Of course, what that really means is “I’m not ready to veer from the status quo.”

When I asked Daniel Kahneman what he thinks the secret is to being a good quitter, he told me, “What everybody needs is the friend who really loves them but does not care much about hurt feelings in the moment.”

When it comes to business endeavors, career choices, or decisions about your personal life, we should all be striving for two things: First, you should find at least one person to be your quitting coach. Second, you should try to serve in that role for the people you love.

You won’t always find something better when you’re forced to quit, but sometimes you will. The problem is that most of us never discover those other opportunities because we can’t see what we’re not even looking for.

Even after you have found a path that you want to stick to, keep doing some exploration. Things change, and whatever you are doing now may not be the best path for you to pursue in the future. Having more options gives you something to switch to when the time is right.

Finish lines are funny things. You either reach them or you don’t. You either succeed or you fail. There is no in between. Progress along the way matters very little.

As Richard Thaler quipped, “If a gold medal in the Olympics is the only grade that passes, you do not want to ever take your first gymnastics class.”

Either explicitly or implicitly, the goal you set is a proxy for an expected-value equation, balancing the benefits that you’re trying to gain against the costs you’ll bear to get them.

Waste is a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one.