The Power of Quitting
#26 - Breaking Free from the 'Grit' Mentality: The Power of Strategic Quitting
In case you prefer to read this post in Italian or Spanish check out the translations ChatGPT wrote for me.
Hello friends, I hope you’re doing great!
This week I thought about writing about a book I recently read called “Quit” by Annie Duke. The author is a thought-provoking writer, I read one of her previous books a few years ago called 'Thinking in Bets'. She's a former professional poker player and I think she found a way to gather very inspiring insights on decision making that are often lateral from conventional wisdom.
The grinding culture
I have grown up in a western culture, where there’s a lot of echo around the concept of “keep trying” and “never giving up”. This is basically the foundational motto of the American Dream, this almost religious belief that if you try hard enough and work long enough on it… anything can happen. This idea of “grit” has become pervasive in Western culture as the key driver to success. Grit is often defined as perseverance and passion for long-term goals, and it is seen as a necessary trait for achieving success in business and life. The tales of business moguls like Bezos, Jobs, Musk are always depicted as stories of people who have achieved great success through perseverance and determination despite facing numerous obstacles and setbacks. But this concept is not only true in business, the myth of Kobe Bryant or Michael Jordan or Serena Williams are all told with this underlying message… giving up is for losers!
In the book’s opening the author has however a great point: “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.” In other words, when reading these stories and thinking about what drove people to success, whatever that means in the context, we need to make sure we do not mix hindsight with foresight… it’s easy to look backwards and find causality between grit and success, but that’s not always immediate when looking forward.
The key argument of the book is that actually “Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.”
I don’t know about you but this concept struck a chord with me, as I wrote in a previous post I am quite a curious person and I like to explore and try new things, that gets me excited and motivated. I have however always felt the stigma and fear of “being a quitter” and I recognise that my lack of expertise in various areas (e.g. as a tennis player, or a guitar player) could have been overcome if I stuck with these things more, spent more time on them and invested more in getting better. After all time and energy are finite, sticking with something means that there’s an implicit opportunity cost : by choosing to stick with something you’re preventing yourself from exploring something different.
The core principle I learnt reading this book though is that this dichotomy between quit and grit is actually not so binary after all: by embracing strategic quitting and reframing it as an opportunity for growth and learning, individuals can break free from this tension and pursue more fulfilling and successful paths.
Rethinking Quitting: A New Perspective
The starting point to understand the value of “strategic quitting” is indeed to remove the stigma associated with the word: “After all, there are lots of circumstances in which quitting is the right choice, particularly when the world tells you that you ought to.. when you’re in a miserable marriage, or a dead-end job, or a major you hate. Why is the word given the Voldemort treatment (The-Word-Which-Must-Not-Be Named)?”
There is actually a very rational reason why, if not paying active attention, we tend to prefer sticking to things rather than quitting: you want to know how it ends. 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?”.
The book has a lot of considerations on the reasons why strategic quitting is a core skill to develop, but the key pillar of this whole process is removing the stigma of quitting providing several examples of cases when quitting is a better option and actually the real driver to the final success. “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. Contrary to popular belief, quitting will get you to where you want to go faster.”
Now the real question that I asked myself when reading the book was “Ok, but how do you understand when you’re quitting strategically and when you’re just giving up?”. This is the central question, how does one realize what to stick to?
For example, consider the case of Blockbuster, the video rental company that once dominated the market but ultimately failed to adapt to the rise of streaming services like Netflix. Blockbuster had a strong brand and loyal customer base, but its leadership failed to recognise the potential of new technologies and the changing preferences of consumers. Instead of pivoting to a new business model, Blockbuster continued to invest in physical stores and late fees, ultimately leading to its downfall.
In contrast, consider the example of Steve Jobs and Apple. Jobs had a clear vision for Apple and was known for his persistence and determination to achieve his goals. However, he also recognized the importance of strategic decision-making and was willing to pivot when necessary. For example, when he returned to Apple in the late 1990s, he re-focused the company on a small number of core products and launched the iconic iMac, which helped to revitalize the company and set it on a path to success.
How do you determine whether you’re in a Blockbuster or an Apple situation? The book offers numerous tips and strategies on how to analyze the situation and help you understand whether quitting is the best option, but in general “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.”
What prevents us from quitting?
CHANGE IS HARD (and failure is not well-regarded socially) - Human nature pulls us from change, we have a tendency to prefer known paths and recognize patterns. It’s very hard to change the status quo: “we have a preference to stick with those decisions, methods, and paths that we’ve already set upon, and a resistance to veering from them into something new or different”. Furthermore in our societies failure still has a social stigma that is very hard to overcome. John Maynard Keynes, summed up this phenomenon well when he said, “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” Simply put: if you fail following the “conventional path”, you will always have the morale excuse that you “followed the rules” or “applied the playbook”. At the end of the day it wasn’t your fault. And similarly succeeding unconventionally carries with it the risk of experiencing failure as a result of veering from the status quo.
LOSS AVERSION - The book provides a lot of science and research on “Prospect Theory”. This theory is a model of how people make decisions, accounting for systematic preferences and biases involving risk, uncertainty, gains, and losses. One of the key findings of prospect theory is loss aversion, recognizing that the emotional impact of a loss is greater than the corresponding impact of an equivalent gain. “Based on the research, losing feels about two times as bad to us as winning feels good to us”. This is very natural tendence: favor options that have the lowest absolute loss associated with them, even if those options come at a lower expected value.
FUTURE EXPECTED VALUE - The key principle that we should leverage when making a decision is that the only thing that matters is the expected future value of each option, once again there’s no simple “quit while you’re winning” or “keep going at any cost” motto that is always valid but recognizing the situation you’re in is the key. “Quit while you’re ahead … when the game you are playing or the path you are on is a losing proposition. 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”. Less sexy as a motto, but more powerful!
SUNK COST EFFECT - this bias is “a cognitive error in which people take into account money, time, effort, or any other resources they have previously sunk into an endeavor when making decisions about whether to continue and spend more”. Very fancy wording for something that I am sure all of us have experienced sooner or later in our life, the thought “I can’t give up now, I have invested so much energy in this…”. This feeling of wasting past efforts could however cloud our judgement for future decisions. Especially because this tendency kicks in mainly when we’re on the losing end of an effort. It turns out that as humans we just don’t like to close mental accounts in the losses. “If we’re losing in a hand of poker, we don’t want to fold because that means we have to realize the loss of the money we put in the pot. If we’re losing in a poker game, we don’t want to quit because it means that we have to leave with less money than we started with. If we’re in a relationship or a job, we don’t want to walk away because we’ll feel like we will have wasted or lost all the time and effort that we put in”. Of course, that’s irrational. What really matters is maximizing your expected value across all the things you start, across all of your mental accounts.
Tips & tricks to confront our tendency to avoid strategic quitting
The book has some very interesting strategies on how to frame decisions in life to avoid that our judgement is clouded by the factors in the section above, and to make sure we base our decisions to maximize EV (expected value).
Monkey and pedestal - this analogy is really well laid out in the book so I will simply report it: “Imagine that you’re trying to train a monkey to juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal in a public park. If you can achieve such an impressive spectacle, you’ve got a moneymaking act on your hands. There are two pieces to becoming successful at this endeavor: training the monkey and building the pedestal. One piece of the puzzle presents a possibly intractable obstacle in the way of success. And the other is building the pedestal. People have been building pedestals since ancient Greece and probably before. Over two-plus millennia, pedestals have been thoroughly figured out. You can buy one at a furniture store or a hardware store, or turn a milk crate upside down. 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.”
I strongly agree with this suggestion, this approach of tackling the hard part of the problem first sounds very simple and intuitive, but I am sure many of you recognize how “innatural” this could be in many cases in our lives. We all have a tendency, when we butt up against a monkey that is proving difficult to solve, to turn our attention to building pedestals rather than giving up. We prefer that illusion of progress to having to quit and admit defeat.Kill criteria - this is probably the biggest take away from the book for me. While I try to do this and the concept is not particularly novel, I believe this approach is not commonly known as it should. The concept is very simple: when you enter into an endeavor, you want to imagine what you could find out that would tell you it’s no longer worth pursuing. Ask yourself, “What are the signs that, if I see them in the future, will cause me to exit the road I’m on? What could I learn about the state of the world or the state of myself that would change my commitment to this decision?” That list offers you a set of kill criteria, literally criteria for killing a project or changing your mind or cutting your losses. It’s one of the best tools for helping you figure out when to quit closer to on time.
Pre-Mortem - While it’s a very standard business practice to write post-mortems after a project did not go as planned, so to learn from mistakes (e.g. a failed enteprise, or an airplane accident) I was unfamiliar with the concept of a premortem, and I think the idea is actually brilliant. 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.
Quit advisor - as many of these discussions getting external help is particularly important for quitting. Having someone, that ideally has no bias and a detached view, that can provide you with some realistic advise, is very powerful. “What everybody needs is the friend who really loves them but does not care much about hurt feelings in the moment”. When reading the book upon reflection, I realized that my wife does this for me a lot, I naturally tend to be less blunt with friends and colleagues, and I admit that reflecting I realized I am a very bad quitting advisor. I always have this tendency to push people to “keep trying”, motivating this with optimism and hoping for the best. The book however opened my eyes on the fact that “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”.
Are you a good quitter?
The book has a closing remark that sums up a lot of the wisdom in it:
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.
I hope this post does not come across as “drop everything you’re doing, do not put much effort into things, don’t work hard”. It is actually the contrary, as I believe strongly in the concept of working hard, grit and sticking to things. Having said that it is very important to make sure that you do that on the right things. And to achieve that goal being a good quitter is a key component.
Have a great week!
Giovanni
I read this piece on quiet quitting; not a new topic (not article), but still pretty actual (companies wanting employees to go above and beyond, rising cost of living, low to no wages increases,...). As a people manager, I ask myself what to do. Maybe a topic for a future post?
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20220825-why-quiet-quitting-is-nothing-new