I finished this book in November 2024. I recommend this book 9/10.
Why you should read this book:
This is a fantastic book that makes you realize that our culture empathizes "sticking in there" and "Having grit" as virtues when the truth is that we might be better off throwing in the towel. Quitting is the opportunity to go and do something else.
Get your copy here.
🚀 The book in three sentences
Quitting opens up the opportunity to do something new.
We set goals as optimistic daydreamers but then turn our goals into old, stubborn ladies.
Use happiness to look into the future and books to look into the past.
📝 My notes and thoughts
xviii. Not written by W. C. Fields, "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. there's no use being a damn fool about it."
P10. Our intrepid climbers offer a good way to think about the grit-quit question: Grit is what gets you up the mountain, but quit is what tells you when to come down. In fact, it is the option to turn around that allows you to make the decision to climb the mountain in the first place.
P14. Having the option to quit allows you to walk away when you find out that the thing that you're doing is broken. If you're near the top of Everest and the weather changes, you want to turn around. If your fight-doctor lets you know that your kidneys are damaged, you can retire from the sport. The same is true for your major, or your job, of the direction of your career, or a relationship, or piano lessons, or even something small as a movie you're watching.
P22. Quitting is the option to start fresh with more knowledge than before.
P28. This raises another valuable lesson about quitting. When you quit, you live to fight another day, sometimes literally. Hutchinson, Taske, and Kasischke, by turning around, lived to continue with the rest of their lives. When poker players fold a hand, they are cutting their losses so they have chips to invest in another, better hand. If they walk away from the table when they're not playing well, they don't go broke and leave themselves without a bankroll to play in another game where they have a better chance to win.
P32. This exposes a common misconception about quitting. We are reluctant to walk away when we should because we have the feeling that doing so will slow our progress or stop it altogether. But it is the reverse that is actually true. If you stick to a path that is no longer worth pursuing, whether it's a relationship that isn't going well, or a stock that you're invested in that's losing money, or an employee that you've hired who isn't performing, that is when you lose ground. 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 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.
P38. After listening to her story, I asked her a simple question: " Imagine it's a year from now and you stayed in the job that you're currently at—what's the probability you're going to be unhappy at the end of that year?" She said, "I know I'm going to be unhappy, one hundred percent." I followed up by asking, "If it's a year from now and you switched to this new job you're considering, what's the probability you're going to be unhappy? She said, "Well, I'm not sure." "Is it one hundred percent?" She said, "Definitely not." At that moment, she realized, "Oh, wait a minute. I'm always going to be unhappy if I stay. If I switch, sometimes I'll be unhappy, but sometimes I won't. Sometimes, I'm going to find real fulfillment in the job that I'm switching to, and that has to be better." All that I had done was to reframe her quitting decision as an expected-value problem. She was considering two options: staying in her job or quitting to take the new position at the insurance company. Which one carried the greater chance of increasing her happiness and making her feel better about her relationship with her children? She realized taking the new job had the higher expected value. Dr. Olstyn Martinez's story reminds us that expected value is not just about money. It can be measured in health, well-being, happiness, time, self-fulfillment, satisfaction, in relationships, or anything else that affects you.
P40. Use "Happiness" to gauge into the future, and use books to measure the past.
P42. For now, 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.
P47. Quitting is buying your time back to go and do something else remarkable. Use the happiness factor to look forward to the future to gauge if you will be happy; if not, quitting is a great option.
P84. When we decide to persevere, we will wait beyond the loss.
P96. We've all had that happen, even for something as simple as standing in a grocery line. When we're approaching the fresh decision of which grocery line to choose, we act like Einstein. We're not just looking at the length of different lines, but we're taking into account an initial read of the speed and experience among cashiers. We're factoring in the location of customers who don't have their payment ready, or seem distracted by their children, or are fumbling with coupons, or have items stored beneath their cart. But once we're in the line and we invest time waiting, we don't apply the same rigor to the decision about whether to switch to a new line. When we see the cashier in the next line race through three customers as the cashier in our line makes small talk while cashing out just one, do we cringe or roll our eyes? Definitely. Do we change lines? Hardly ever. And the longer we wait—the more time we sink into the line we have chosen—the more unwilling we are to switch lines. That's how we get entrapped.
P101. When we start something, whether it's putting money into the pot in a hand of poker, or starting a relationship or a job, or buying a stock, we open up a mental account. When we exit that thing, whether it's folding a hand, or leaving a relationship or job, or selling the stock, we close that mental account. It turns out that 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 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. If you're investing in a number of stocks, some are going to win, and some are going to lose. What matters is whether you're winning across your whole portfolio, not whether any one investment is up or down. But that's not how we mentally think. We don't think about the whole portfolio of stocks we own. Each is associated with its own mental account that we don't want to close out unless we are in the gains. What's true for one stock or one hand of poker is just as true for an individual decision or a project, or climbing a mountain, or opening a discount store in a converted chicken coop. When we start any of these things, we open a mental account. When things start going poorly, we don't want to quit because we don't like to close accounts in the losses. This is why poker players remind themselves that poker is one long game. We would all do well to remember that life is one long game as well.
P107. Sunken cost—If you are in the minus, it's hard to quit.
P113. One of Teller's valuable insights is that pedestal-building creates the illusion of progress rather than actual progress itself. When you are doing something that you already know you can accomplish, you're not learning anything important about whether the endeavor is worth pursuing. You already know you can build the pedestal. The problem is whether you can train the monkey. On top of that, Teller realizes that when you're building pedestals, you are also accumulating sunk costs that make it hard to quit, even as you find out that you may not be able to train the monkey to juggle those torches. By focusing on the monkey first, you naturally reduce the debris you accumulate, solving for something that's, in reality, already solved.
P115. 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 when we ought to. Essentially, 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. Kill criteria could consist of information you learn that tells you the monkey isn't trainable, or that you're not sufficiently likely to reach your goal, or signs that luck has gone against you.
P128. Chapter summary:
Monkeys and pedestals are 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 to train 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 goals, 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 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 t a different way to get rewarded beyond dogged and blind pursuit of a project until the bitter end.
A common, simple way to develop kill criteria is with "states and dates:" "If by (date), I have/haven't (reached a particular state), I'll quit."
P152. You've probably heard people (including yourself) when thinking about taking a new path, say, "I don't want to make a decision right now." You likely accepted that as a reasonable thing to say. But once you step back and think about it, you realize that deciding not to change is itself a decision. At any moment, when you're pursuing a goal, you are choosing to either stay on the path you're on or change course. Sticking with the path is as much of a decision as choosing to quit. In fact, the decision about whether to stay or go is, by definition, the same choice. One of the steps to becoming a better quitter is to not accept "I'm not ready to make a decision right now" as a sentence that makes sense. At every moment of your life, you have a choice about whether to stay or whether to go. When you choose to stay, you are also choosing not to go. When you choose to quit, you are also choosing not to continue. It's crucial to start realizing that those are the same active decisions.
P157. Waiting to make a decision is also a decision.
P163. When it comes to quitting, the most painful thing to quit is who you are.
P171. The desire to maintain a positive self-image contributes to the problem about quitting. When you quit, you're closing a mental account, and we know that we don't like to close those accounts in the losses. If you abandon a belief, that is the moment you admit you were mistaken. If you set out on a course of action and change your mind, that's when you go from "failing" to "having failed." And if you have failed, doesn't that mean you made a mistake to start in the first place? Of course, the answer is no. But that's now how it feels to us. If you're in a cult and you quit, why did you join in the first place? Why did you give away all your money? Why did you cut off your family? If you quit figure skating, what does that mean for all the time you put into that effort? Does that mean all those decisions were wrong? Does that mean you've failed in your goal? This desire to maintain internal consistency, as we've already seen, stops us from quitting. As does the worry that other people are going to judge us as harshly as we judge ourselves.
P178. Be picky about what you stick to. Preserve 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.
P179. Quitting is the opportunity to do something else.
P190. When it comes to business endeavors, career choices, or decisions about your personal life, we should all be striving for two things: First, you should find at least one person to be your quitting coach. Second, you should try to serve in that role for the people you love.
P193. That's exactly what Staw and his colleagues found when they looked at nine years of loans at 132 California banks. When there was management turnover, new management was much quicker to acknowledge when a loan was in trouble. Having not made the initial decision to approve the loan, they were much more likely to write it off as a loss. I suppose one lesson from Staw's data is that if you have a business that's gotten a loan and you're now in financial trouble, you should go back to the same person who originally lent you the money. You're much more likely to get it. On a more serious note, this suggests a good strategy for businesses that want to get better at their quitting decisions: When possible, divide and conquer. Have the people who make the decisions to start things be different from the people who make the decisions to stop those things.
P195. Instead, when someone comes to you, it's better to use Ron Conway's approach, which can be summarized in these four steps:
1. Let them know that you think they should consider quitting.
2. When they push back, retreat and agree with them that they can turn the situation around.
3. Set a very clear definitions arouns what success is going to look like in the near future and memorialize them down as a kill criteria.
4. Agree to revisit the conversation, and if the benchmarks for success haven't been met, you'll have a serious discussion about quitting.
P227. Be like ants. They keep exploring for other food sources, while they enjoy their current meal.
P231. The point the authors are echoing is that, while goals do help us to be grittier, grit isn't always a virtue. As you already know, grit is good for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, but grit also gets you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile. In part, 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 in a bad situation because they focus you on the finish line and motivate you to keep going.
P232. The pass-fail nature of goals impedes your progress because it stops you from starting things for fear of being unable to complete them. No doubt, the person who trained and ran sixteen miles of a marathon is better off health-wise than the person who never started. If your goal is to be healthier, the person who tried has clearly made more progress toward that goal. But for many of us, that fear of failing short makes us not want to start.
P245. When we worry that quitting means we've failed, what exactly are we failing at? If you quit something that's no longer worth pursuing, that's not a failure. That's success.
P246. Lots of hard things are worth pursuing and grit is good for getting you to stick with it when it's right. But lots of hard things are not worth pursuing, and the ability to walk away when it's right is also a skill worth developing.
P247. Goals make you partly blind, and that is both good and bad.
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