About a decade ago, I made an agonizingly difficult decision to quit a new position that I had been very excited about, uprooted my life, moved thousands of miles for, and still had the potential for a bright future. I wasn’t completely disillusioned, but I had glimpsed multiple potential future problems down the road. The higher-ups in the organization seemed unwilling to change course despite my tactful warnings. So I quit. In hindsight, it was the right decision. But for a number of years the feelings that I had given up too soon bubbled up regularly. That’s why I read Annie Duke’s book Quit because I had seen a blurb about a chapter heading that read “Quitting on Time Feels Like Quitting Too Early.” It covers exactly how I felt, but also vindicated the timing of that fateful decision.
I had never thought of myself as a quitter until that big decision. I’ve since quit other things. After quitting something big, it’s easier to quit smaller things. The rationale I’ve given myself is that I’d rather spend my time in other ways. I suppose I’ve learned some of the things that Duke discusses in her book such as opportunity cost. Doing one thing means you’re not doing some other thing. I’m not a quantum particle with the potential to be in two places at once. Actually, even quantum particles can’t do so. But the quitting still hung over me with tinged with negativity. Duke’s book helps one look past that perspective. Here are some excerpts from her prologue that set the tone of the book.
“We view grit and quit as opposing forces. After all, you either persevere or you abandon course… 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… Quitters never win, and winners never quit… 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.”
Duke will provide a host of examples to underscore this point, the main thesis of her book. Instead she frames success as “picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.” She also reminds the reader that circumstances constantly change. While you may have set a goal for yourself, you sometimes have to adapt. You have to look down the road and make an approximate determination (because you’ll never have all the facts and you can’t exactly predict the future) as to whether your road ahead leads to a positive expectation value or a negative one. Duke, a championship poker player, after being forced to quit academia for health reasons, knows what it means to constantly decide when to stay and when to fold.
Should you always quit while you’re ahead? Duke has practical suggestions of how to consider this. She also explains why it’s particularly difficult to quit once you’ve wrapped your identity into your present course, and instead of quitting when you should, you do the opposite and “escalate your commitment”. She employs the visual aid of a katamari, a sticky rolling ball that picks up debris, growing larger in the process. She discusses the behavior of ants and how even after a food source is formed, there is still constant exploration. Keeping the options open. Because the environment is going to change.
As a scientific researcher, I’m constantly evaluating whether a project is worthwhile to pursue. I have a filing-cabinet-full of projects that were discarded partway when I deemed it was time to move on. When you first start a project, it’s hard to tell whether it’s going to pan out. You don’t know what will stick. I liked Duke’s discussion of the importance of kill criteria. One needs to set these out to know when to kill a project and move on. The sunk cost is already sunk. Continuing to push ahead will likely result in diminishing returns or worse: further losses of time, energy, money, and more. My kill criteria have been haphazard, and Duke made me think about how to sharpen these.
I also found Duke’s assertion that you should tackle (or at least get some handle or realistic picture of) the most difficult thing in a project first (before the easier stuff) to make good sense. Her visual image, borrowed from an interview with Eric Teller: “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. There are two pieces to becoming successful at this endeavor: training the monkey and building the pedestal… The bottleneck, the hard thing, is training a monkey to juggle flaming torches… there is no point building the pedestal if you can’t train the monkey.” So now I have the image: Monkeys and Pedestals, also a chapter title in her book. I’m also reminded of Barbara Oakley’s advice to students to tackle the hardest problems on an exam first, but quickly pivot when needed.
As a chemistry instructor and also an academic advisor, I occasionally find myself in a discussion with a student about whether they should quit something. It may be the dream of going to medical school. It may be dropping a class. It may be changing their major. My students, certainly more so than me, have grown up hearing the gospel of grit. Quitting looks super-bad to them. The student is usually quite shocked to hear me support a quitting decision that they have agonized over. I tell them that they know themselves best. But I also have to tell them that sticking out a class and getting a ‘C’ is not the end of the world, particularly when it means they don’t have to retake it (and waste more time and energy).
Grit isn’t a bad thing. But sometimes it needs to be paired with quit. They aren’t opposites. They’re complementary. Duke makes that clear in a chapter title: The Opposite of a Great Virtue is also a Great Virtue.
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