Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

by Annie Duke

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.

It is rare to find any popular quote in favor of quitting except one attributed to 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.”

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.

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

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.”

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.

after you’ve set out on a particular course of action, new information will reveal itself to you. And that information is critical feedback.

Sometimes, that new information will be new facts. Sometimes, it might be different ways to think about or model a problem or a set of data or the facts you already have. Sometimes, it will be a discovery about your own preferences. And, of course, some of that new information will be about which future you happen to observe, a good one or a bad one.

When you take all these aspects of uncertainty together, it makes decision-making hard. The good news is that ...

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.”

There’s an old saying in poker that goes “Any two cards can win,” meaning that if you stick with your hand, there is always some possibility, no matter how slim, that even a terrible hand can triumph. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go on to say, “. . . but not enough of the time for it to be profitable.”

He could see the writing on the wall, but when you are a good quitter, often you’re the only one able to read it.

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

Once they complete that track, the plan is to turn their attention to construction connecting San Francisco and Silicon Valley, two areas already pretty well connected by roadways.

Eye roll

The reasoning behind the five-to-ten year time horizon is that if the solution could be developed in fewer years, somebody else is probably already working on it. If it is going to take longer than a decade, the technology might be outdated by the time it gets to market.

Every dollar they save by getting to no quickly is a dollar they can spend on something that could change the world.

The bottleneck, the hard thing, is training a monkey to juggle flaming torches. The point of this mental model is to remind you that there is no point building the pedestal if you can’t train the monkey. In other words, you ought to tackle the hardest part of the problem first.

“If we find the Achilles’ heel,” Teller told me, “thank God we found the Achilles’ heel after $2 million instead of after $20 million.”

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

Every minute you spend on something with a low expected value is a minute you don’t have for other opportunities of greater value.

A sales professional’s time is a valuable and limited resource. Any time spent on a low-value lead is time they can’t spend on higher-value leads, or developing new opportunities. That means that if they don’t quickly identify and quit the likely dead ends, that is what will, in reality, slow progress.

The important thing is to be better, not perfect.

When your identity is what you do, then what you do becomes hard to abandon, because it means quitting who you are.

Every time you rationalize away new information in order to cling to a belief, that belief becomes more tightly woven into the fabric of your identity. The act of rejecting the facts becomes circular. Now the next time you discover conflicting information or your actions don’t align with your beliefs, you’re going to be even more motivated to stick to those beliefs.

We are all trying to defend ourselves against how we imagine other people are going to judge us. We get it in our heads that if we don’t stick to our original choice, that will reflect negatively on us.

Be picky about what you stick to. Persevere in the things that matter, that bring you happiness, and that move you toward your goals. Quit everything else, to free up those resources so you can pursue your goals and stop sticking to things that slow you down.

Joining a start-up means working for little pay in exchange for the promise of equity.

Thats a lie

When possible, divide and conquer. Have the people who make the decisions to start things be different from the people who make the decisions to stop those things.

When people ask for advice, don’t confuse that with being given permission. Instead, when someone comes to you, it’s better to use Ron Conway’s approach, which can be summarized in these four steps. STEP 1 | Let them know that you think they should consider quitting. STEP 2 | When they push back, retreat and agree with them that they can turn the situation around. STEP 3 | Set very clear definitions around what success is going to look like in the near future and memorialize them down as kill criteria. STEP 4 | Agree to revisit the conversation and, if the benchmarks for success haven’t been met, you’ll have a serious discussion about quitting.