Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

by Annie Duke

The power of diversification is, of course, well known in the investment world. Investors want a diversified portfolio for the same reason the ants do, to reduce the impact on their bottom line in case any one of their investments craters.

But, of course, that’s not the way the world actually is. And that’s why you want to take the call from the recruiter. Because that exploratory conversation might protect you in case the company you work for goes out of business, or there are layoffs, or you just decide that you don’t like your job anymore.

One of the goals for all of us should be to, as much as possible, maximize the diversification of interests, skills, and opportunities in each of our portfolios. There are all sorts of ways you can execute on that in your own life.

It’s the same idea for your education. Don’t come to college dead set on only one major. Think about several majors that have features or future career paths that might interest you. When you’re choosing courses, pick the ones that satisfy a requirement for as many majors as possible.

Why did so many people who had lost their jobs during the pandemic decide to quit when those jobs came back? Based on what we’ve learned in this book about quitting decisions, we can take some educated guesses. First, the people who lost their jobs at the start of the pandemic were forced to explore other options that might be available to them to earn a living, something that they wouldn’t generally have done under other circumstances. That gave them a better sense of the landscape and allowed them to see opportunities they might have been neglecting. Second, it also allowed them to reexamine their own preferences. In the same way that Maya Shankar figured out that she didn’t like solo work, being forced to quit gets

you to ask yourself what the features are that you like and don’t like of the work you have been doing. Do you want to be physically present in a workplace or do you prefer to work remotely? Do you want something with more flexible hours? Do you love your job? Do you find it fulfilling? Is there something else that would make you happier? It might seem that people would ask themselves those questions all the time, but it often takes being forced to walk away for people to take a second look.

Third, when you’re currently employed, you have a mental account open. Being forced to quit caused all those people to close those accounts. We know that when you have an account open, it’s difficult to walk away. You feel like a failure, that you fell short, or that you gave up. There are so many cognitive forces working against you. But when there was this mass layoff,...

They learned the lesson the ants have down pat: Don’t wait to be forced to quit to start exploring alternatives.

Many of these injuries happened to dedicated distance runners. By continuing to run in pain, they weren’t just risking their health or the pain of a more serious injury. They were also jeopardizing their ability to train and run in future races, something they clearly loved and prioritized in their lives.

Why do these runners disregard their pain to the point where continuing to push through means that some body part breaks? And again, after the injury, why do they continue on, putting their future ability to run another race at risk? Because there’s a finish line. 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.

Once you start the race, success is only measured against crossing the finish line.

But just because there are a lot of benefits to setting goals doesn’t mean that there isn’t a downside to them as well. As you might already suspect, clearly defined finish lines should come with a warning: Danger, you may experience escalation of commitment.

a number of papers making the case that goals have a dark side. They point to numerous negative consequences of goal setting, several of which interfere with rational quitting behavior. In particular, they note the pass-fail nature of goals, their inflexibility, and how pursuing them leads to ignoring other opportunities that might be available. The point the authors are echoing is that, while goals do help us to be grittier, grit isn’t always a virtue. As you already know, grit is good for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, but grit also gets you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile. In part, what makes goals effective is that they get you to focus on the finish line and motivate you to keep going. But the duality is that goals also keep you from quitting in a bad situation because they focus you on the finish line and motivate you to keep going.

If we’re running in a marathon, anything but 26.2 miles is a failure. This is how goals exacerbate escalation of commitment, because anything short of the finish line is unacceptable to us. It doesn’t matter what’s happening in the world or what’s happening in our bodies. We don’t want to feel like we’ve failed.

The shame in all this is that those finish lines are often arbitrary. If you complete 5 kilometers in the context of a 5K, you’ve succeeded. But if that’s as far as you run in the context of a half-marathon, that’s a failure. If you run 13.1 miles in the context of a half-marathon, that’s a success, but in the context of a full marathon, you have failed. And successfully running 26.2 miles becomes a failure if you were attempting an ultramarathon.

The goal becomes fixed even as all the inputs that led to choosing that particular goal evolve. The conditions in the world change. Our knowledge changes. The weights we attach to the benefits and costs change. Our preferences and values change. As these things change, if we were to rerun the cost-benefit analysis, the output would surely be different. But we don’t rerun it.

In combination, the pass-fail and fixed nature of goals causes us to just keep on toward the finish line, even when the finish line is no longer what we should be running toward. Inflexible goals aren’t a good fit for a flexible world.

Goals are powerful tools. They can make it possible to accomplish worthwhile things. But the mere fact of having a goal can cause escalation of commitment, where you end up sticking to a goal that’s no longer the best way to achieve the things you want to achieve.

This is why having kill criteria is so important. When you set a goal, creating a list of kill criteria gives you the unlesses that you need to be more rational about when it’s the right time to walk away. Those kill criteria could be about what the world is signaling to you, like observing behavior that tells you that your boss is toxic, or interest rates are rising, or a fog is rolling in, or there’s an onset of a pandemic.

To make these unlesses most effective, we need to create strong precommitment contracts that set out how we’re going to follow through on those kill criteria. Then, to make sure that we’re picking the unlesses that are going to get us to the fastest answer about whether the thing we’re doing is worth pursuing, we need to do the work of identifying monkeys and pedestals.

If you’re trying to summit Everest because you get a lot of value out of that physical and mental challenge, you’re not objectively in the losses if you make it to Camp 1, 2, 3, or 4, or 300 feet from the summit, certainly not in comparison with not having tried at all. Of course, that’s not our subjective experience. That’s what we need to change.

We need to start giving ourselves more credit for how far we are from where we started.

Leaders commonly fall into the trap of evaluating people solely by whether they’ve achieved a goal or not. When they do that, they’re increasing the potential for escalation of commitment.

If they couldn’t see the gorilla right in front of their noses, what do you think you are missing when you are pursuing a goal?

What makes it so hard to quit, if we were to sum up everything that we’ve talked about in this book, is that when we quit, we fear two things: that we’ve failed, and that we’ve wasted our time, effort, or money. We need to redefine what “failed” and “wasted” mean.

If you quit something that’s no longer worth pursuing, that’s not a failure. That’s a success.

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.

Contrary to popular belief, winners quit a lot. That’s how they win.