We live in a culture that celebrates perseverance and grit. People who keep their nose to the grindstone and see projects through are considered role models for success. Quitting, on the other hand, is seen as a weakness synonymous with giving up. But quitting can actually be a winner’s super power if you do it at the right time, says former professional poker champion Annie Duke, author of her new book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.
“Quitting is incredibly valuable, but we’re not particularly skillful at doing it, and we don’t take advantage of it much,” says Duke. “We think it’s a character flaw—being called a ‘quitter’ is an insult. But you can go faster and relieve yourself of analysis by paralysis if you give yourself the option to reverse course and quit.”
Why We Hate Quitting
Quitting is hard for a few reasons. First, humans are also certainty seekers, says Duke. “We want to know how the thing we’re doing turns out,” she explains. “Maybe it will work out, and the only way to answer that question is to keep going and work harder.”
Another reason people are timid about quitting is that success is connected to sticking to it. “We see examples around us and think, If I want to do well in life, if I want to succeed, then I’ve got to stick to the things that I’m doing,” says Duke. “Just because you’ve succeeded at something you stuck through doesn’t mean that if you stick [with] something else, it will succeed.”
Finally, many of us struggle with quitting due to the sunk cost fallacy that prevents us from stopping things we’ve started, says Duke. We’ve invested time, money, or resources. Walking away from that can feel like a failure even if the thing we’re doing has no chance of succeeding.
How to Get Better at it
The key to successful quitting is doing it at the right time. Unfortunately, most of us are bad at judging this time. “Usually we’re quitting too late,” says Duke. “Quitting at the right time is really hard, and the solution for quitting is similar to the solution for better decision-making in general.”
Duke offers two main strategies for getting better at quitting, and the first is to pre-decide when you should quit.
“When you’re in the middle of the decision, you’re going to be bad at it,” says Duke. “The Nobel Laureate Richard Thaler said the only time we’re really sure that we should quit is when it’s no longer a decision.’”
For example, if you decide that you want to eat healthy and there’s a box of chocolates sitting in front of you, that’s when you’re going to be at your worst, explains Duke. “It’s going to be really hard for you to follow through,” she says. “We believe when things aren’t going well, we’ll have intuition, see the signals, and make a good decision about it. But it just doesn’t hold up. In fact, we will often escalate our commitment to whatever we’re doing because we’re in the middle of it. It’s a hard moment to go from failing to having failed, and so will tend to rationalize it away and avoid it when we’re in that moment.”
To get better at quitting, get out of the moment and make the decision when we’re not actually facing down that decision. Duke suggests thinking ahead of time what the signals might be that something isn’t working out. Then, commit to what you’ll do when you see them.
“I call these ‘kill criteria,’” she says. “You’re in a more rational state of mind when you’re thinking about the future. It’s easier to identify the signals in advance, and you’ll be more likely to follow through.”
The second strategy is enlisting a “quitting coach”—someone who will help you make the decision.
“We’ve all been in situations where we see someone else pursing a project or goal they should no longer to pursuing,” says Duke. “It’s very clear that the project isn’t worth their time, or that their approach isn’t quite right, and they need to throw it out. When you look from the outside, you can see it clearly; but when you’re on the inside, you can’t. Recruit people who have your best interest at heart to help you with these decisions to walk away.”
Quitting at the right time can provide a lot of benefits. For example, sticking to something that isn’t worthwhile can cause you to lose ground on other goals. Quitting frees you up to pursue new things.
“Quitting gets us to where we want to go faster because it lets us stop doing something that is slowing us down because it isn’t worth our time,” says Duke. “We can switch to something that’s going to cause us to gain more ground toward our goals. Being a good quitter actually helps you achieve the right things more quickly.”
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