Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Annie Duke (14%)

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```json { "title": "Quit", "authors": [ "Annie Duke" ], "publisher": "Penguin", "publishedDate": "2022-10-04", "description": "From the bestselling author of Thinking in Bets comes a toolkit for mastering the skill of quitting to achieve greater success Business leaders, with millions of dollars down the drain, struggle to abandon a new app or product that just isn’t working. Governments, caught in a hopeless conflict, believe that the next tactic will finally be the one that wins the war. And in our own lives, we persist in relationships or careers that no longer serve us. Why? According to Annie Duke, in the face of tough decisions, we’re terrible quitters. And that is significantly holding us back. In Quit, Duke teaches you how to get good at quitting. Drawing on stories from elite athletes like Mount Everest climbers, founders of leading companies like Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, and top entertainers like Dave Chappelle, Duke explains why quitting is integral to success, as well as strategies for determining when to hold em, and when to fold em, that will save you time, energy, and money. You’ll learn: How the paradox of quitting influences decision making: If you quit on time, you will feel you quit early What forces work against good quitting behavior, such as escalation commitment, desire for certainty, and status quo bias How to think in expected value in order to make better decisions, as well as other best practices, such as increasing flexibility in goal-setting, establishing “quitting contracts,” anticipating optionality, and conducting premortems and backcasts Whether you’re facing a make-or-break business decision or life-altering personal choice, mastering the skill of quitting will help you make the best next move.", "image": "http://books.google.com/books/content?id=o6hXEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&img=1&zoom=1&edge=curl&source=gbs_api", "language": "en", "categories": [ "Business & Economics" ], "pageCount": 337, "isbn10": "0593422996", "isbn13": "9780593422991", "googleBooks": { "id": "o6hXEAAAQBAJ", "preview": "http://books.google.com/books?id=o6hXEAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=intitle:Quit:+The+Power+of+Knowing+When+to+Walk+Away,+Annie+Duke&hl=&cd=1&source=gbs_api", "info": "http://books.google.com/books?id=o6hXEAAAQBAJ&dq=intitle:Quit:+The+Power+of+Knowing+When+to+Walk+Away,+Annie+Duke&hl=&source=gbs_api", "canonical": "https://books.google.com/books/about/Quit.html?hl=&id=o6hXEAAAQBAJ" } } ```

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[ciwchris]

1

• We tend to celebrate people who respond to adversity by soldiering on. The quitters, in comparison, are invisible.
• If we don't notice the decision-making of the quitters, it's hard to learn from them.
• Quitting a course of action is sometimes the best way to win in the long run, whether you're cutting your losses at the poker table or getting to climb another day.
• Quit and grit are two sides of the exact same decision.
• Decision-making in the real world requires action without complete information. Quitting is the tool that allows us to react to new information that is revealed after we make a decision.
• Sticking with a course of action is the only way to find out for sure how it will turn out. Quitting requires being okay with not knowing what have been.
• Having the option to quit helps you to explore more, learn more, and ultimately find the right things to stick with.

2

• Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early.
• The hardest time to make a quitting decision is when you're in it.
• Our intuition is that quitting will slow down our progress. The reverse is actually true. If you walk away from something that is no longer worthwhile, that frees you up to switch to something that is more likely to help you achieve your goals - and you'll get there faster.
• When the time is objectively right to quit, nothing particularly dire will be happening right at that moment. Getting the timing right means looking into the future and seeing that the chances things will go your way are too slim.
• Thinking in expected value helps you figure out if the path you are on is worth sticking to. EV 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.
• If you feel like the choice between persevering and walking away is a close call, it's likely that quitting is the better choice.
• In hindsight, we can see when someone has waiting too long to quit, and we end to be harsh in our judgement of those people. But when someone quits before it seems obvious to others, we mock them for quitting too early. That's the quitting bind.

3

• A key finding of prospect theory is loss aversion, the phenomenon whereby the emotional impact of a loss is greater than the corresponding impact of an equivalent gain.
• Loss aversion creates a preference for options associated with a lower chance of incurring a loss. It makes us risk averse.
• When we are in the gains, we have a tendency to quit too early in order to avoid the risk of giving those gains back. In other words, we like to quit while we're ahead.
• When we are in the losses, we become risk seekers. We want to keep going, hoping we can avoid ever having to realize the loss. Daniel Kahneman has characterized this as sure-loss aversion. In other words, we like to stick when we're behind.
• Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early, and the usually part is specifically when you're in the losses.
• Retail investors show this pattern of quitting when they're ahead and sticking when they're behind.
• Even export investors don't get their quitting decisions just right. They outperform on their buying decisions but underperform on their selling decisions.
• We naturally track and get feedback on the things we are doing. But once we quit something, we also quit keeping tack of the course of action. This creates a problem with getting high-quality feedback, which in turn makes it hard to hone our quitting skills.

4

• When we are in the losses, we are not only more likely to stick to a losing course of action, but also to double down. This tendency is called escalation of commitment.
• Escalation of commitment is robust and universal, occurring in individuals, organizations, and governmental entities. All of us need to get stuck in course of action once started, especially in the face of bad news.
• Escalation of commitment doesn't just occur in high-stakes situations. It also happens when the stakes are low, demonstrating the pervasiveness of the error.

5

• The sunk cost effect is a cognitive illusion where people take into account resources they have previously sunk into an endeavor when making decisions about whether to continue and spend more.
• The sunk cost effect causes people to stick in situations that they out be be quitting.
• When deciding whether to stick or quit, we are worried that if we walk away, we will have wasted the resources we have spent in the trying.
• You might be experiencing the sunk cost fallacy if you hear yourself thinking "If I don't make this work i will have wasted years of my life!" or "We can't fire her now, she's been here for decades!"
• Sunk costs snowball, like a katamari. The resources you have already spent make it less likely you will quit, which makes it more likely you will accumulate additional sunk costs' which makes it again less likely you will quit, and so on. The growing debris of you prior commitment makes it increasingly harder to walk away.
• We don't like to close mental accounts in the losses.
• Knowing about the sunk cost effect doesn't keep you from falling prey to it.
• 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 ay you might intuitively think it would.

6

• 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 that as quickly as possible; and (c) beware of false progress.
• Building pedestals creates the illusion that you are making progress toward your goal, 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 we butt of against a hard problem we can't solve, we have a tendency to turn to pedestal-building rather than choosing to quit.
• Advance planning and precommitment contracts increases the chances you will quit sooner.
• 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 already in the gains or in the losses. In organizations, kill criteria allow people 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."

7

• The endowment effect is a cognitive bias where we value something we own more than we would if we didn't own it.
• We can be endowed to objects but also to our own ideas and beliefs.
• Endowment is an obstacle to quitting because when we irrationally value things we own, we miscalculate their expected value. We might thing the company we started or the project we devised or the belief we have is worth more than it actually is.
• We prefer to stick with the status quo.
• We are more tolerant of bad outcomes that come from sticking with what we are already doing than bad outcomes that come from switching to something new. This phenomenon is part of omission-commission bias.
• When you say, "I'm just not ready to decide yet," what you are really saying is, "For now, I am choosing the status quo."
• Even in highly data-rich environments like professional sports, sunk cost, endowment, and status quo bias distort decision-making.

8

• When it comes to quitting, the most painful thing to quit is who you are. Our ideas, beliefs, and actions are part of our identity.
• When new information conflicts with a belief, we experience cognitive dissonance.
• To resolve the conflict, we can either change the belief or rationalize away the new information. Too often, we choose the latter.
• Dissonance can also result from new information coming into conflict with our past actions.
• We have a desire to maintain internal consistency, when our past beliefs and actions line up with our present beliefs and actions.
• We also want others to view us as consistent. We worry that if others see inconsistency between our present and past decisions, beliefs, or actions, they will judge us as being wrong, irrational, capricious, and prone to mistakes.
• When we know or believe our decisions are being evaluated by others, our intuition is that we will be more rational, but the opposite is true. External validity increases escalation of commitment.
• The more extreme a position is, the more cognitive gymnastics we'll do to defend it. The facts are more likely to persuade you away from the consensus opinion than a fringe view.
• Fears about how others ill view us if we quit are usually overblown.

9

• Optimism makes you less likely to walk away while not actually increasing your chances of success. That means that being overly optimistic will make you stick to things longer that aren't worthwhile. Better to be well calibrated.
• Life's too short to spend your time on opportunities that are no longer worthwhile.
• When someone is on the outside looking in, they can usually see your situation more rationally than you can.
• The best quitting coach is a person who loves you enough to look out for your long-term well-being. They are willing to tell you the hard truth even if it means risking hurt feelings in the short term.
• Decisions about when to quit improve when the people who make the decisions to start things are different from the people who make the decisions to stop those things.
• Getting the most out of a quitting coach requires permission to speak the truth.

10

• Being forced to quit forces you to start exploring new options and opportunities. But you should start exploring before you're forced to.
• Even after you have found a path that you want to stick to, keep doing some exploration. Things change, and whatever you are doing now may not be the best path for you to pursue in the future. Having more options gives you something to switch to when the time is right.
• Exploration helps you to diversify your portfolio of skills, interests, and opportunities.
• A diversified portfolio helps to protect you against uncertainty.
• Backup plans are good to have especially because some backup plans can turn out to be better than what we're already pursuing.

11

• Goals can make it possible to achieve worthwhile things, but goals can ales 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 and learned along the way.
• Set intermediate goals and prioritize goals that allow you to recognize progress along the way or acquire something valuable even if you don't reach the goal.
• Goals, when set, are a proxy for an expected-value equation, balancing the benefits that you're trying to gain against the costs you're willing to bear.
• Inflexible goals aren't a good fit for a flexible world.
• With better advance planning (like identifying monkeys and pedestals and kill criteria) and the help of a good quitting coach, you can make goals more flexible, setting at least one "unless' and planning regular check-ins on the analysis that initially led to setting the goal.
• In general, when we quit, we fear two things; that we've failed and that we've wasted our time, effort, or money.
• Waste is a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one.

[ciwchris]

Grit is good. But only while it makes sense. The trick is to figure out when that is.

We are not confused hindsight with foresight, which is what these aphorisms do. - ex: try try again, quitters never win and winners never quit

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

The opposite of a great virtue is also a great virtue.

The desire for certainly is the siren song calling us to preserve, because perseverance is the only path to knowing for sure how things will turn out if you stay the course.

Endowment effect: when we own something, we value it more highly than an identical item that we do not own. - and not just possessions but also in our beliefs and ideas. What we've bought and what we've thought.

omission -comission bias: We are much more concerned with errors of commission than errors of omission. We're more wary of causing a bad outcome by acting than letting it happen through inaction.

When your identity is what you do, then what you do becomes hard to abandon, because it means quitting who you are. — we shouldn't ask kids what do they want to be when they grow up. Instead we should ask what job they want.

This desire to maintain internal consistency stops us from quitting. As does the worry that other people are going to judge us as harshly as we judge ourselves.

We need to find a way to flip the script and stop measuring ourselves solely by how far we are from the finish line. We need to start giving ourselves more credit for how far we are from where we started.

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.