Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 382

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away," by Annie Duke.

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. Prospectively, it’s neither true nor good advice. In fact, sometimes it’s downright destructive.

If you are able to cut your losses earlier, that’s a huge win. An added bonus is that it frees you up so you can turn your limited attention and resources to more fruitful endeavors that have a higher expected value, reducing opportunity costs. 

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

Astro Teller clearly understands that quitting gets you where you want to go faster. 

The sooner you figure out that you should walk away, the sooner you can switch to something better. And the sooner that happens, the more resources you’re saving, which you can then devote to more fruitful endeavors.

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

Success means following a good decision process, not just crossing a finish line, especially if it is the wrong one to cross. That means appropriately following kill criteria, listening to our quitting coaches, and recognizing that the progress we’ve made along the way counts for a lot. 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.

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