Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

Goals can make it possible to achieve worthwhile things, but goals can also increase the chances that we will escalate commitment when we should quit. Goals are pass-fail in nature. You either reach the finish line or you don’t, and progress along the way matters very little. Don’t just measure whether you hit the goal, ask what you have achieved a

You can’t trick yourself into not taking sunk costs into account by trying to view the situation as a new choice. Asking whether or not you would continue if the decision were a fresh one doesn’t mitigate the sunk cost effect the way you might intuitively think it would.

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.

Whether it is your own actions or new and disconfirming information, when it comes to a battle between the facts and changing your beliefs, the facts too often lose out.

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.

Chapter 6 Summary Monkeys and pedestals is 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 training the monkey. When faced with a complex, ambitious goal, (a) identify the hard thing first; (b) try to solve for tha

The lesson here is that we shouldn’t wait to be forced to find a Plan B. We should always be doing some exploration, especially because sometimes Plan B can turn out to be better than the thing you’re already pursuing.

within a year, she had put together a cross-agency group of behavioral scientists, policy experts, and program makers, founding and chairing the White House’s first-ever Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. When Obama left office in January 2017, Shankar also departed, moving on to become Google’s global director of behavioral science. In 2021, she

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.