A note from Daniel

By this time, Flow's burn rate was $150,000 per month. Wilkinson's total investment was more than $5 million, with no end in sight. The world was telling him that in this case, a scrappy, bootstrapped company trying to fight a well-funded, venture-backed company was a losing battle. Yet, he still didn't shut it down, continuing on for seven more years, until he had eventually put $11 million into the company. During this period, he saw revenue growth slow and then stop, while Asana (along with other competitors in the space) kept making their product better. In the midst of all this, he fielded an offer to acquire Flow for $6 million. He refused, because he had $11 million into it and he didn't want to have to realize the sure loss of $5 million. Classic sunk cost fallacy.

Daniel Quit, page 139 · November 17, 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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