Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

by Annie Duke

“Every business school has a course in starting new businesses, but few have a course in shutting them down at the right time.

Muhammad Ali became a symbol of grit. Against all odds, among a sea of naysayers, he

had refused to give up and triumphed. Is there any greater testament to the power of persistence and perseverance when it comes to pursuing your dreams?

Sylvester Stallone, who was in the audience that night, described the last round as “like watching an autopsy on a man who’s still alive.” Yet, Ali still wouldn’t give up.

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.

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

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.

We ought not confuse hindsight with foresight, which is what these aphorisms do.

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

If someone calls you a quitter, would you ever consider it a compliment? The answer is obvious. Quitting means failing, capitulating, losing. Quitting shows a lack of character. Quitters are losers (except, of course, when it involves giving up something obviously bad like smoking, alcohol, drugs, or an abusive relationship).

need to tell you that I’m not giving up! I’m just starting a new chapter.”

whether you say “pivot” or “moving on to the next chapter” or “strategic redeployment,” all of

these things are, by definition, quitting. After all, stripped of its negative connotation, quitting is merely the choice to stop something that you have started. We ought to stop thinking that we need to wrap the idea of quitting in bubble wrap and serve it soft.

Why is the word given the Voldemort treatment (The-Word-Which-Must-Not-Be Named)?

there is a cognitive and behavioral thumb tilting the scale’s balance toward persevering when it comes to weighing grit versus quit.

knowing when to quit is a skill worth developing.

what the science is telling us is that every day, in ways big and small, we act like Muhammad Ali, sticking to things too long in the face of signals that we ought to quit.

Whenever we commit to a course of action, by default we are committing to not pursuing other things.

The Opposite of a Great Virtue Is Also a Great Virtue

eight times more people die on Everest on the way down than on the way up.

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 it.” On

(If you think it’s hard to get to Everest, try planning a trip to the Vinson Massif, the highest point in Antarctica.)

We tend to think only about one side of the human response to adversity: the ones who go for it.

How can we learn if we don’t even see the quitters? Worse yet, how are we supposed to learn if, when we do see them, we view them negatively, as people not worthy of our admiration, as cowards or poltroons?

Quitting Is a Decision-Making Tool

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.

You can’t put out an MVP unless you have the ability to pull it back. The whole point is to get information quickly, so you can quit the stuff that isn’t working and stick with the things that are worthwhile or develop new things that might work even better.

Quitting is what allows companies to maximize speed, experimentation, and effectiveness in highly uncertain environments.

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. Having the option to quit allows you to walk away when you find out that the thing that you’re doing is broken. If you’re near the top of Everest and the weather changes, you want to turn around. If your fight doctor lets you know that your kidneys are damaged, you can retire from the sport.

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.”

“Any two cards can win,”

If folding is difficult for amateurs at the beginning of the hand, it’s even more difficult once a player has committed money to the pot. It is hard to overcome the urge to protect the money you have already bet, regardless of the likelihood that the next bet is a favorable choice.

quitting when you are losing difficult.

These are hard problems. We’re not omniscient. We don’t have crystal balls or time machines. All we have is our best assessment of an uncertain and changing landscape and the hope that we have honed our quitting skills enough to walk away when conditions turn against us. This is the fundamental truth about grit and quit: The opposite of a great virtue is also a great virtue.

To get there, it would have to endlessly throw money at acquiring new users, who would be of lower and lower quality, to capture more eyeballs to find those diehards that would support the game.

“You have to convince investors, and you have to convince the press, and you have to convince potential employees, and you have to convince customers. And I had done a lot of convincing of people to come work on this project, to leave whatever they were working on before, quit their job, get poorly paid in exchange for equity. . . .”

the acronym for “Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge.” Slack. It stuck.

Quit While You Still Have a Choice

Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early.

shouldn’t be surprising that making good decisions about quitting requires mental time travel since 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.

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.

he understood that quitting had a better expected value than continuing.

Quitting Decisions Are Expected-Value Decisions

People have the idea that an ER doctor is running around pumping people’s chests, constantly doing crazy life-and-death stuff. Of course, there is some of that, but, as Olstyn Martinez describes it, the essence of the job is more about the daily challenge of dealing with the wear of seeing humanity at its loneliest and most heartbreaking.

“Oh, wait a minute. I’m always going to be unhappy if I stay. If I switch, sometimes I’ll be unhappy, but sometimes I won’t. Sometimes, I’m going to find real fulfillment in the job that I’m switching to, and that has to be better.”

to reframe her quitting decision as an expected-value problem.

When you are making a decision about whether to quit, you need to listen to those people from the past who are giving you important advice. Sometimes, the person sending you a message is someone who has traveled a similar path before you. And sometimes, the person traveling from the past is an earlier version of yourself.

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.