The Problem of Quitting

We understand the importance of perseverance. But, as Seth Godin wrote:

“You can pull out every stop, fight every step of the way, mortgage your house and your reputation–and still fail. Or, perhaps, you can quit in a huff at the first feeling of frustration.

 

The best path is clearly somewhere between the two. And yet, too often, we leave this choice unexamined.”

 

It is that choice that Annie Duke has written a book about called (what else?) Quit: The Power of Knowing when to Walk Away. I haven’t read the book but her interview with David Epstein was interesting.

 

The biggest problem to quitting is the sunk cost fallacy: So much time and effort has already been spent, so wouldn’t quitting mean all that effort was in waste? Projects don’t get scrapped even when the cost and delays have spiraled out of control. Stocks that we bought and can’t bring ourselves to sell at a loss. There are endless examples. She has an interesting perspective on that:

“What the sunk cost fallacy shows us is that we naturally think of waste as a backward looking problem; I don’t want to have wasted my time, my energy, my money. But what waste really is is a forward looking problem. Is it right for me to waste time and money going forward? And the irony is that the fear of having wasted then causes us to waste more.”

 

But theory is easy, practice isn’t. Are there any tricks and techniques that help? The first one Duke explains is defining the “kill criterion”… in advance:

“The first one is to think in advance. When we think in advance about the signals we might see in the future that would tell us we ought to walk away — and then commit in advance to actually walking away when we see those — we are better off. If you say in advance that when I’m climbing this mountain, if a fog rolls in, I’m going to walk away, it does make a difference when that fog rolls in, and by a lot.”

 

Another technique is to set an end date:

“That is something very important about kill criteria, it’s not just a state of the world that you need to be identifying, it’s actually a date. You need to put a deadline on it.”

This is to avoid the risk of moving the goalposts endlessly.

 

A third suggestion she makes is to get an external perspective, someone with knowledge of whatever you’re doing.

“Is this an issue that you’re not trying hard enough, or it’s not a good fit? Other people looking from the outside can see our situation more clearly than we can.”

 

I’ll probably read the book some time.

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