Quit

 Every time I read a non-fiction book that I like, I make a few notes. Sentences, the occasional turn of phrase, bits that resonated with me. 

I decided to start publishing some of them here so that the zero followers I have could also appreciate them.

 

The following excerpt is taken from 'Quit -the Power of Knowing when to walk away by Anne Duke.

We view grit and quit as opposing forces. After all, you either persevere or you abandon course. You can’t do both at the same time, and in the battle between the two, quitting has clearly lost.

While grit is a virtue, quitting is a vice.

The advice of legendarily successful people is often boiled down to the same message: Stick to things and you will succeed.

By definition, anybody who has succeeded at something has stuck with it. That’s a statement of fact, always true in hindsight. But that doesn’t mean that the inverse is true, that if you stick to something, you will succeed at it.

Prospectively, it’s neither true nor good advice. In fact, sometimes it’s downright destructive.

If you are a bad singer, it doesn’t matter how long you stick with it. You’re not going to be Adele. If you are fifty years old and set your sights on becoming an Olympic gymnast, no amount of grit or effort will make it possible for you to succeed. Thinking otherwise is as absurd as reading one of those articles about the habits of billionaires, finding out that they wake up before 4 a.m., and figuring that if you get up before 4 a.m. you will become a billionaire.

We ought not confuse hindsight with foresight, which is what these aphorisms do.

People stick to things all the time that they don’t succeed at, sometimes based on the belief that if they stick with it long enough, that will lead to success. Sometimes they stick with it because winners never quit. Either way, a lot of people are banging their heads against the wall, unhappy because they think there is something wrong with them rather than something wrong with the advice.

Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.

When the world tells you to quit, it is, of course, possible you might see something the world doesn’t see, causing you to rightly persist even when others would abandon the cause. But when the world is screaming at the top of its lungs to quit and you refuse to listen, grit can become folly.Too often, we refuse to listen.

This may be, in part, because quitting has a nearly universal negative connotation. If someone calls you a quitter, would you ever consider it a compliment? The answer is obvious.

Imagine that you’re trying to train a monkey to juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal in a public park. If you can achieve such an impressive spectacle, you’ve got a moneymaking act on your hands.

Teller recognizes that there are two pieces to becoming successful at this endeavor: training the monkey and building the pedestal. One piece of the puzzle presents a possibly intractable obstacle in the way of success. And the other is building the pedestal. People have been building pedestals since ancient Greece and probably before. Over two-plus millennia, pedestals have been thoroughly figured out. You can buy one at a furniture store or a hardware store, or turn a milk crate upside down.

The bottleneck, the hard thing, is training a monkey to juggle flaming torches.

The point of this mental model is to remind you that there is no point building the pedestal if you can’t train the monkey.

In other words, you ought to tackle the hardest part of the problem first.

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?

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.

Kill criteria work well for investing in the market. Setting a stop-loss or a take-gain are examples of kill criteria, but you could also set criteria more broadly, asking yourself in advance what the signals in the market might be that would cause you to change your investment strategy.

The good news about kill criteria is that you haven’t missed your chance to set them once you have already started an endeavor. At any point, no matter whether it comes to someone you are dating or a house you already own or an investment you are in or a college you are attending, you can think about some time frame in the future, imagine you are unhappy with your situation, and identify the benchmarks you will have missed or the signals you will be seeing that will tell you that you ought to walk away. You may not have set a stop-loss or take-gain when you bought a stock but you can set one now.

After all, the present is always in advance of something.

States and Dates

The best quitting criteria combine two things: a state and a date. A state is just what it sounds like, an objective, measurable condition you or your project is in, a benchmark that you have hit or missed. A date is the when.

Kill criteria, generally, 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.” Or “If I haven’t done X by Y (time), I’ll quit.” Or “If I haven’t achieved X by the time I’ve spent Y (amount in money, effort, time, or other resources), I should quit.”

If you like what you've read, please consider buying the book.