Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

by Annie Duke

“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.

There's a fallacy of some type here. Survivorship bias?

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

stripped of its negative connotation, quitting is merely the choice to stop something that you have started.

No need to give it meaning it doesn't need

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. And a rosy present is a hard thing to walk away from.

having the option to quit is what will keep you from being paralyzed by uncertainty or being stuck forever in every decision you make.

realizing that most decisions aren't final allows us to take a certain amount of risk

The road to sustained profitability for a business is not only about sticking to a strategy or business model (even one that has been profitable in the past). It is also about surveying and reacting to the changing landscape.

it is similar for an individual. pay attention to how things are changing. maybe you can stop something you've been doing for a long time in order to free up resources for me success and joy

To be good at the game you just have to learn to live with that. Playing every hand you are dealt is an easy and fast way to go broke since you would be playing too many hands that aren’t profitable in the long run.

just because there's a chance you might succeed shouldn't blind you to the fact that you'll likely fail.

If we don’t notice the decision-making of the quitters, it’s hard to learn from them.

learning lessons is still a success

Quitting requires being okay with not knowing what might have been.

regret for quitting should be recognized for what it is so that you don't disempowering yourself and make bad decisions in the future

quitting effectively, when the context warrants it, ought to be the definition of a happy ending. It is just hard for us to see it that way because we process quitting as failure.

if the appearance of failure is the strongest reason not to quit, then measure without that metric to get a more logical decision

making good decisions about quitting requires mental time travel since the worst time to make a decision is when you’re in it.

give yourself measure before you're too deep to quit that tell you when it is time

Anytime you stay mired in a losing endeavor, that is when you are slowing your progress. Anytime you stick to something when there are better opportunities out there, that is when you are slowing your progress.

sometimes it's about the opportunity costs

you can consider this simple heuristic as a rule of thumb: If you feel like you’ve got a close call between quitting and persevering, it’s likely that quitting is the better choice.

This behavior, expertly exercising the option to quit, baffles us. In trying to make sense of the world, we will impute all sorts of things.

The things we say about people who quit is regurgitated propaganda.

Whenever you choose to stick, you are, by definition, not quitting. The reverse is true when you choose to quit.

Both quitting and persevering are opposites of the same decision. A problem calibrating one is a problem calibrating the other as well.

Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early, and the usually part is specifically when you’re in the losses.

We are naturally risk/loss averse. So look at it a decision to quit is taking that into consideration.

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.

Instead of the over simplified "Quit while you're ahead"

We naturally track and get feedback on the things we are doing. But once we quit something, we also quit keeping track of that course of action. This creates a problem with getting high-quality feedback, which in turn makes it hard to hone our quitting skills.

Think about looking at data for retrospectives after quitting to give feedback to yourself on your quitting muscle.

His laboratory and field experiments show that whether it is on the level of an individual, an organization, or a governmental entity, when we’re getting bad news, when we are getting strong signals that we’re losing—signals that others plainly see—we don’t merely refuse to quit. We will double and triple down, making additional decisions to commit more time and money (and other resources) toward the losing cause, and we will strengthen our belief that we are on the right path.

Even though we can see the writing on the wall, our ego has us try to save have by any means possible

Persevering in the face of tall odds, as Ali or Rob Hall did, is not exceptional. Quitting a losing course of action before certain failure is.

quitting when given the signs that you aren't going to succeed is actually punk as fuck

But this is irrational. If you wouldn’t buy a stock today, you ought not hold it today, because a decision to hold is the same as a decision to buy.

Just because you have something doesn't make it any more valuable than it is... or will be

In addition to the direct costs of the project, there is the issue of opportunity costs.

It seems poetic to use opportunity costs to help combat the sunk cost fallacy

poker players remind themselves that poker is one long game. We would all do well to remember that life is one long game as well.

the goal is to come out ahead, not to succeed in everything we attempt

Knowing is not the same as doing.

To know is to do

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

every util (spoon?)you saved by quitting what you should as quick as you can is a util you can invest in your next venture (or current winning ones)

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

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.

It's the unknowns that should be looked into to see if something is worth your time/energy/money/spoons

We prefer that illusion of progress to having to quit and admit defeat.

it's about saving face.

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

Kill Criteria

the signals to cut your losses

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

this idea of casting yourself into the future, imagining a failure, and then looking back to try to figure out why is called a premortem. Using a premortem is a great tool to help develop high-quality kill criteria.

imagine the failed future to create kill criteria

But other signals required further action. For each of those, we identified the information that the seller needed to discover, as quickly as possible, from the potential customer.

sometimes the signals aren't for an immediate kill but for purposeful investigation as quickly as possible

The important thing is to be better, not perfect. After all, we’re only human and we’re operating under conditions of uncertainty.

this applies to more than just knowing when to quit

Monkeys and pedestals is a mental model that helps you quit sooner.

focus on training the monkey because you know you can build a pedestal

When we butt up against a hard problem we can’t solve, we have a tendency to turn to pedestal-building rather than choosing to quit.

Doing what you know you can do just because you don't know about another thing it's a great way to sink unnecessary time, effort, and cost into an endeavor

She just couldn’t bring herself to retire, which she considered “too permanent and too final. It would end an identity. . . .

how much is wrapped up in our identities?

In large part, we are what we do, and our identity is closely connected with whatever we’re focused on, including our careers, relationships, projects, and hobbies. When we quit any of those things, we have to deal with the prospect of quitting part of our identity. And that is painful.

this answers the identity question somewhat, but asking myself might be helpful

When you are deciding whether to sell your wine, or your car, or your house, you are choosing whether or not to persist in owning those things.

linking the endowment effect to choosing to quit or persist

A higher chance of failing is more tolerated on paths that don’t rock the boat. After all, what’s the go-to defense in a postmortem after we make a decision that doesn’t work out? “I followed procedure,” or “I stuck with the status quo,” or “I made the consensus choice.”

The next time that you find yourself saying, “I’m just not ready to decide yet,” what you should actually say is “For now I think that the status quo is still the best choice.” Maybe you need more information to know whether to switch.

if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice

When it comes to quitting, the most painful thing to quit is who you are.

How important is your identity?

Being in a cult becomes an integral part of your identity. You are a Seeker. You believe in the prophecy. Membership becomes who you are, particularly because the beliefs you are committing to are so extreme, as are the actions you take based on those beliefs. Cutting off your family and friends. Giving up all your possessions. Exposing yourself to ridicule from the outside world.

cult membership is party of your identity

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

this is why it is so hard to change careers

Whether it is your own actions or new and disconfirming information, when it comes to a battle between the facts and changing your beliefs, the facts too often lose out.

This is why political "teams" are so cult like

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.

If everyone is worried about what everyone else thinks of them then nobody is actually spending much time thinking about any individual, including you

We may quickly outgrow the made-up childhood tales of frightening ogres, dragons, and witches. The scary stories that replace them, about the judgments of others, continue to torment us as adults but are no more real.

Persevere in the things that matter, that bring you happiness, and that move you toward your goals.

That is value. Even if it is not monetary.

Life’s too short.

so don't use up your resources for things with no (more) expected value (EV)