Quit Quotes

“When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“Contrary to popular belief, winners quit a lot. That’s how they win.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“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.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“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.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“If you feel like you’ve got a close call between quitting and persevering, it’s likely that quitting is the better choice.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“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.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“What is true for grit is true for optimism. Optimism gets you to stick to things that are worthwhile. But optimism also gets you to stick to things that are no longer worthwhile. And life’s too short to do that.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“Monkeys and pedestals is a mental model that helps you quit sooner. Pedestals are the part of the problem you know you can already solve, like designing the perfect business card or logo. The hardest thing is training the monkey. When faced with a complex, ambitious goal, (a) identify the hard thing first; (b) try to solve for that as quickly as possible; and (c) beware of false progress. Building pedestals creates the illusion that you are making progress toward your goal, but doing the easy stuff is a waste of time if the hard stuff is actually impossible. Tackling the monkey first gets you to no faster, limiting the time, effort, and money you sink into a project, making it easier to walk away. 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. Advance planning and precommitment contracts increase the chances you will quit sooner. When you enter into a course of action, create a set of kill criteria. This is a list of signals you might see in the future that would tell you it’s time to quit. Kill criteria will help inoculate you against bad decision-making when you’re “in it” by limiting the number of decisions you’ll have to make once you’re already in the gains or in the losses. In organizations, kill criteria allow people a different way to get rewarded beyond dogged and blind pursuit of a project until the bitter end.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“Quit and grit are two sides of the exact same decision. Decision-making in the real world requires action without complete information. Quitting is the tool that allows us to react to new information that is revealed after we make a decision.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“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.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“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.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“When it comes to quitting, the most painful thing to quit is who you are.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“Optimism makes you less likely to walk away while not actually increasing your chances of success. That means that being overly optimistic will make you stick to things longer that aren’t worthwhile. Better to be well calibrated. Life’s too short to spend your time on opportunities that are no longer worthwhile.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“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. But what shouldn’t stop you from quitting (or getting that information) is that it’s too scary to switch because loss aversion is too intense.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“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.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“When we are in the losses, we are not only more likely to stick to a losing course of action, but also to double down. This tendency is called escalation of commitment. Escalation of commitment is robust and universal, occurring in individuals, organizations, and governmental entities. All of us tend to get stuck in courses of action once started, especially in the face of bad news. Escalation of commitment doesn’t just occur in high-stakes situations. It also happens when the stakes are low, demonstrating the pervasiveness of the error.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“Staw’s central insight about escalation of commitment is that the phenomenon is not confined to matters like the Vietnam War, a complex geopolitical conflict with national pride wrapped up in it. 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.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“this isn’t what Levitt found. When he followed up with the coin flippers two and six months later, 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. While the decisions may have felt close to the people making them, they were not actually close at all. As judged by the participants’ happiness, quitting was the clear winner. Because people were much happier when they quit what they considered a close decision, that shows that people are generally quitting too late.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“By not quitting, you are missing out on the opportunity to switch to something that will create more progress toward your goals. 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.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“At the moment that quitting becomes the objectively best choice, in practice things generally won’t look particularly grim, even though the present does contain clues that can help you figure out how the future might unfold. The problem is, perhaps because of our aversion to quitting, we tend to rationalize away the clues contained in the present that would allow us to see how bad things really are.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“In general, when we quit, we fear two things: that we’ve failed and that we’ve wasted our time, effort, or money. Waste is a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“Don’t just measure whether you hit the goal, ask what you have achieved and learned along the way.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“That means you have to keep checking back in on the cost-benefit analysis that the goal is a proxy for. You should reevaluate, on a regular cadence, whether the values that you’re trying to privilege are still being privileged and whether the values that you’re deprivileging, the costs that you’re bearing, are still worth it. Those check-ins also offer an opportunity to reevaluate old kill criteria and set new ones.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“He described the endowment effect as “the fact that people often demand more to give up an object than they would be willing to pay to acquire it.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“Third, and perhaps most important, the turnaround time is a reminder that the real goal in climbing Everest is not to reach the summit. It is, understandably, the focus of enormous attention, but the ultimate goal, in the broadest, most realistic sense, is to return safely to the base of the mountain.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“What does Conway do to counter these vehement arguments? Nothing. He agrees with them that they can make it work. He doesn’t try to convince the founders that they’re wrong. Instead, he asks them what success would look like over the next few months. And he asks them for specifics. That conversation allows him to sit down with the founder and set performance benchmarks that would signal that the company was heading in the right direction. Then, they agree when to revisit those benchmarks and, if the venture is falling short, to have a serious discussion about shutting it down. This probably sounds a lot like Conway is using kill criteria, and that’s because he is.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“He considers it his duty to help these founders understand the futility of persevering, so these brilliant people can move on to more worthwhile opportunities. The first obstacle Conway faces is the most obvious one: getting founders to actually recognize that the venture is failing and that it’s time for them to walk away. Conway is battling the host of cognitive and motivational forces that make it hard for these entrepreneurs to do that.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“It’s not just that we need to set more flexible goals. We ourselves also need to be more flexible in the way we evaluate success and failure.”
― Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away