A note from Daniel

The sunk cost effect makes us all, in ways big and small, build a track from nowhere to nowhere, refusing to quit because we don't want to lose what we've already spent. It could be someone staying in their money pit of a house. Our track to nowhere could be refusing to quit our college major even though it's making us unhappy, because we already took so many classes and put so much time into it. Or we don't leave a career we spent years training for, because that would mean our training was for nothing. Or we keep watching a bad movie because of the time we've already spent watching it. Because we put time or effort or money into anything we have started, the sunk cost fallacy affects all of our decisions about whether to stop.

Daniel Quit, page 94 · August 28, 2024 Save to shelf
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Daniel p. 247

Chapter 11 Summary: • 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.
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Daniel p. 247

Chapter 11 Summary: • 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 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.
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Ultra Successful p. 60

The False Constraints That Limit Your Potential: - How Quickly You Can Scale Whether it's your business or your career, there are unspoken timelines that people accept as gospel.They are all untrue: "You can only really grow at 10% a year." "You need to pay your dues for a decade before getting promoted." These artificial limits keep people moving at a crawl when they could be sprinting or pushing for more. The most successful people I know refuse to accept conventional wisdom about timelines, and oddly enough, they break them all the time.
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