 | Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away offers a profound antidote to the mantra “Quitters never win and winners never quit.” Instead, the author demonstrates through fascinating examples of real-life situations and scientific studies the opposite truth: “Contrary to popular belief, winners quit a lot. That’s how they win.” She opens the book describing the career of Muhammed Ali, who staged impressive comebacks, but also boxed after doctors told him to stop. “The same grit that helped Ali become such a great champion—admired and revered almost without equal—became his undoing when it drove him to ignore signs that were obvious to anyone on the outside looking in that he should quit.” |
PERSISTENCE: Why do we persist when we should stop? Because we crave certainty.
“Sticking with a course of action is the only way to find out for sure how it will turn out. Quitting requires being okay with not knowing what might have been.”
And not knowing if a new venture will succeed or fail. “All we have is our best assessment of an uncertain and changing landscape and the hope that we have honed our quitting skills enough to walk away when conditions turn against us.”
“Sticking with a course of action is the only way to find out for sure how it will turn out. Quitting requires being okay with not knowing what might have been.”
And not knowing if a new venture will succeed or fail. “All we have is our best assessment of an uncertain and changing landscape and the hope that we have honed our quitting skills enough to walk away when conditions turn against us.”
The author offers many excellent tools to assess our aversion to quitting and to help us leave bad situations more easily. Here are some highlights:
 | SUCCESS: “Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest. … 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. [But if] we don’t cut our losses when it’s warranted, those losses will continue to accumulate.” “Our intuition is that quitting will slow down our progress. The reverse is actually true. If you walk away from something that is no longer worthwhile, that frees you up to switch to something that is more likely to help you achieve your goals and get you there faster.” |
EXPECTED VALUE “tells you whether any option you are considering is going to be, on balance, positive or negative to you in the long run.”
For example, if we stay in a job or relationship where we’re miserable, staying in that situation is 100% guaranteed to keep us unhappy. Whereas we don’t know how we’ll feel in a new job or relationship, but it’s unlikely to be 100% miserable (unless, of course, the problem is our attitude in any situation). Therefore leaving the current situation for a new one has a higher expected value.
For example, if we stay in a job or relationship where we’re miserable, staying in that situation is 100% guaranteed to keep us unhappy. Whereas we don’t know how we’ll feel in a new job or relationship, but it’s unlikely to be 100% miserable (unless, of course, the problem is our attitude in any situation). Therefore leaving the current situation for a new one has a higher expected value.
TIMING: When we quit is tricky, in part because we are often driven by loss aversion. Because of loss aversion, “losing feels about two times as bad to us as winning feels good to us. … The result is that we’ll quit when we’re ahead, even if we’re giving up good opportunities to win more. If we’re behind, we don’t want to quit, even if persisting—to try to get to the other side of zero—is more likely to make things worse.”
 | “Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early, … specifically when you’re in the losses.” The author cited a study of cab drivers, who quit on busy nights once they make their quota (even though continuing to work would bring in more money) and worked extra on rainy nights when they get few fares (even though economically, it wasn’t worth their time). She saw the same behavior among amateur gamblers when she was a professional poker player. When they were losing money, they kept playing and lost more, rather than walking away. |
IDENTITY: “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.” Also, “ownership can interfere with our ability to walk away, especially when the thing we own, we created.”
I borrowed this book from the library to help me process ending my successful massage therapy business when my illness made it impossible for me to continue. Quitting was the obvious (only) choice, but in no way easy and I came to it very reluctantly.
I borrowed this book from the library to help me process ending my successful massage therapy business when my illness made it impossible for me to continue. Quitting was the obvious (only) choice, but in no way easy and I came to it very reluctantly.
 | FORCED QUITTING: Closing my massage practice was especially distressing because it wasn't my choice. “For all of us, there are times in our lives when the world makes us stop what we’re doing. … It’s obviously painful when the decision to quit is not our own. But eventually, when that happens, we all have to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and look for something new to do.” The silver lining: more time to write and be with my spouse, and lots of nap time with the cats! |
SUNK COSTS: Forty years of experiments and fieldwork have repeatedly demonstrated the effect of “sunk costs” on human behavior: “In decisions about whether to move forward, [people] take into account what they’ve already spent. They do this because they irrationally think that the only way to recover or justify the costs is if they continue on. Put simply, the sunk cost effect causes people to stick in situations that they ought to be quitting.”
 | War is the ultimate “sunk cost” dilemma. When soldiers die, their families don’t want their sacrifice to be in vain. “But the reality is that when it comes to decisions about whether to continue or withdraw, what matters is whether the next life is worth putting at risk. . . . If we continue, are our chances of getting the outcome we want worth risking additional lives and imposing those losses on other families?” |
“When deciding whether to stick or quit, we are worried that if we walk away, we will have wasted the resources we have spent trying.” These sunk costs snowball. “The resources you have already spent make it less likely you will quit, which makes it more likely you will accumulate additional sunk costs . . . The growing debris of your prior commitments makes it increasingly harder to walk away.”
 | An example is the California bullet train project, meant to link Los Angeles and San Francisco by high-speed rail, originally approved by voters in 2008 for $9 billion dollars. Structural engineers have yet to figure out how to tunnel through the mountains separating the two cities (they’ve spent $8 billion in designs), and the estimated cost to complete the structure is now estimated at $105 billion. “Every dollar that California sinks into the project is a dollar that could otherwise be allocated to something that would create more value and a greater public good for the taxpayers whose money is funding the endeavor.” |
HARDEST FIRST: The bullet train brings up another important principle: figure out the hardest problems first. If you can’t get the train through the mountains, it doesn’t make sense to lay track on the flatlands. Tackling the hardest parts first will quickly reveal if the project is feasible at all. “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.”
For writers, this means doing the actual writing and revising, not diving down research rabbit holes or rearranging our desks to feel more productive.
For writers, this means doing the actual writing and revising, not diving down research rabbit holes or rearranging our desks to feel more productive.
BELIEFS: We experience cognitive dissonance “when new information conflicts with our prior beliefs. When that happens, it makes us uncomfortable, and we want to make that discomfort go away. So we rationalize away the new information so we can defend our prior beliefs.”
 | “Every time you rationalize away new information to cling to a belief, that belief becomes more tightly woven into the fabric of your identity. The act of rejecting the facts becomes circular. Now the next time you discover conflicting information or your actions don’t align with your beliefs, you’re going to be even more motivated to stick to those beliefs.” This process helps explain the political polarization currently plaguing the US. It’s also a common feature of cults. |
COMMITMENT: Barry Staw is a social scientist who watched his father create a retail empire and then refuse to divest from or sell the unprofitable stores because of his emotional attachment. Barry demonstrated that “whether it is on the level of an individual, an organization, or a government entity, when we’re getting bad news, when we’re 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.”
 | Barry Staw “saw the US involvement in the Vietnam War as a living, breathing, high-stakes, slow-motion train wreck of an example of our inability to quit. … By the end of the war, it was widely believed [the war] was unwinnable, yet even then decision-makers [couldn’t quit], instead responding with [an] escalation of commitment to the losing course of action, responding to the growing awareness that there was no real path to victory for the United States by increasing the nation’s commitment to the war.” |
GOALS: It seems like pursuing specific goals might help us make good life choices. But goals can create their own problems. What “makes goals effective is that they get you to focus on the finish line and motivate you to keep going. But the duality is that goals also keep you from quitting a bad situation because they focus you on the finish line and motivate you to keep going.”
 | The author cites several instances of runners breaking leg bones during a marathon at the 1-, 6-, or 8-mile mark--yet they kept running the entire 26+ miles. “Why do these runners disregard their pain [and] continue on, putting their future ability to run a race at risk? Because there’s a finish line.” “Once we start toward a finish line, we accumulate the sunk costs of time and effort and money spent trying to get there. [When] we quit, we fear two things: that we’ve failed, and that we’ve wasted our time, effort, or money. … [We need to realize] that spending another minute or another dollar or another bit of effort on something that is no longer worthwhile is the real waste. … If you quit something that’s no longer worth pursuing, that’s not a failure. That’s a success.” |
KILL CRITERIA: “If we can identify in advance what the signals are that we should pay attention to and make a plan for how we will react to them, we can increase the chances that we’ll cut our losses when we ought to.”
 | The author tells the story of four climbers on Mount Everest who had to turn around by 1:00, no matter how close they were to the summit, to return safely. Two of the climbers did turn back (quit), the ones who didn’t stop reached the summit at 4:00—but died trying to climb back down. “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 [should] include both states and dates, in the form of “If I am (or am not) in a particular state at a particular date or at a particular time, then I have to quit.” For example: I will send this short story to 10 professional magazines, and if I get no acceptance, I’ll move on to 10 semi-pro publications. Or, I will query agents for nine months and if I haven’t gotten any positive response by then, I’ll stop querying that book and focus on the next novel. |
BACKUP PLANS: The author uses ants as an example of creatures who allocate resources to a known food source, but scout ants are always searching for new, and potentially better, resources.
 Author playing poker | “Backup plans are good to have especially because some backup plans can turn out to be better than what we’re already pursuing.” Example: After getting her Ph.D, the author was preparing to deliver lectures to secure a tenure-track position when she was hospitalized with an acute illness. During her year-long recovery, her brother (a professional gambler) talked her into playing poker for income. She ended up playing poker professionally for the next 18 years. For writers: By developing a balance between scouting new opportunities (new stories) and developing what we already have (the stories we’ve already started), we increase our chances of not wasting our time on stories that fall short and instead writing strong, resonant stories that engage readers. |
The author says: “For any of us, having a diversified portfolio of interests, skills, and opportunities helps to protect us from uncertainty.”
LIFE IS SHORT: “we all have limited time on this planet to devote to different opportunities we might pursue. … 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.”
If you’re looking for solid advice on navigating life’s challenges by making smart choices, check out Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. Highly recommended.
If you’re looking for solid advice on navigating life’s challenges by making smart choices, check out Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. Highly recommended.
Read more about the mind-bending beliefs of cults: Cultish
Read about overcoming political polarization: Love You, Hate Your Politics, Say the Right Thing
Read how political propaganda influences our decisions: Stories are Weapons
Read a feminist take on the social context of our decisions: The Witches are Coming
Read how racism factors into decision-making: How to be an Anti-Racist
Read about overcoming political polarization: Love You, Hate Your Politics, Say the Right Thing
Read how political propaganda influences our decisions: Stories are Weapons
Read a feminist take on the social context of our decisions: The Witches are Coming
Read how racism factors into decision-making: How to be an Anti-Racist
