Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

“The results of this paper suggest that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.” The corollary of this is also true. When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call.

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.

When we commit to a course of action, it means that, in some sense, we now own that decision. The value we attach to things, whether they are bottles of wine or our commitment to an endeavor, is likely going to be greater than those same things when they belong to others, and greater than others think those things of ours are worth.

While grit can get you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, grit can also get you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile.

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

for so many of us, that fear of falling short makes us not want to start.

John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, summed up this phenomenon well when he said, “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” Succeeding unconventionally carries with it the risk of experiencing failure as a result of veering from

let’s amend our quitting aphorism to say: Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early, and the usually part is specifically when you’re in the losses.

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.