Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

by Annie Duke

We also need to redefine what waste is. What does it mean to waste your time or money or effort? Our problem is that we tend to think about these things in a backward-looking way. We feel like if we walk away from something, that means we’ve wasted everything that we put into it. But those are resources that are already spent. You can’t get them back. We need to start thinking about waste as a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one. That means realizing that spending another minute or another dollar or another bit of effort on something that is no longer worthwhile is the real waste. Once you think about it that way, you realize how much time has actually been wasted in the service of the idea that if you quit, the time you’ve already spent will be for naught.