Daniel's notes on Quit

All these famous people, and countless others, have united behind variations of the expression "Quitters never win, and winners never quit." It is rare to find any popular quote in favor of quitting except one attributed to W. C. Fields: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no use being a damn fool about it."

“Anybody who has succeeded at something has a stock with it” This statement is always true in hindsight. 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.

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.

But whether you say "pivot" or "moving on to the next chapter" or "strategic redeployment," all of these things are, by definition, quitting. After all, stripped of its negative connotation, quitting is merely the choice to stop something that you have started.

Making a plan for when to quit should be done long before you are facing the quitting decision. It recognizes, as Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, that the worst time to make a decision is when you're "in it." On Everest, when the summit is within reach and you have sacrificed so much to be there, you are truly in it. That is when you will be the least fit to make a decision about whether to continue on or to quit. That is why turnaround times are set long before you are ever faced with that choice.

There is no doubt that quitting is an important decision-making skill. Getting the decision right is sometimes a matter of life or death. That was the case on Everest. But even in this life-or-death situation, we don't seem to remember the quitters at all. We tend to think only about one side of the human response to adversity: the ones who go for it. The people who continued up the mountain become the heroes of the story, tragic or otherwise. They are the ones who catch your attention, the ones who persevered, despite not adhering to the turnaround times and dying.

When Charles Dickinson called Andrew Jackson a coward and a poltroon (quitter) in a local newspaper in 1806, Jackson challenged Dickinson to a duel, killed him, and it didn't stop Jackson from becoming president in 1829. If calling someone a quitter is grounds to shoot them, how can we expect people to appreciate how important it is to become skilled at walking away?

Just imagine if any decision you made was last and final. Whatever you decide, you would have to stick with it for the rest of your life. Think of how certain you would have to be before you could ever make a choice to start anything. Having no option to change course or change your mind would be disastrous in a landscape that itself is changing, where mountains can become molehills, and molehills can become mountains. If the mountain you've been scaling turns out to be a glacier that's starting to melt beneath you, you want to climb down it before you're washed away.

Any decision is made under some degree of uncertainty, stemming from two different sources, most of our decisions being subject to both. First, the world is stochastic. Luck makes it difficult to predict exactly how things will turn out, at least not in the short run. We operate not with certainties but with probabilities, and we don't have a crystal ball that tells us which among all the possible futures will be the one that actually occurs. Second, when we make most decisions, we don't have all the facts. We have to make decisions with only partial information, certainly far less than we'd need to have to make a perfect choice.

Luck makes it difficult to predict how things will turn out. Dealing with probabilities means we can’t tell when the 20% is going to happen. Also we normally don’t have all the facts when making a decision that will prevent us from making a perfect decision. But after you've set out on a particular course of action, new information will reveal itself to you. And that information is critical feedback. Sometimes, that new information will be new facts. Sometimes, it might be different ways to think about or model a problem or a set of data or the facts you already have. Sometimes, it will be a discovery about your own preferences. And, of course, some of that new information will be about which future you happen to observe, a good one or a bad one.

Quitting is what allows companies to maximize speed, experimen-tation, and effectiveness in highly uncertain environments. If you are moving fast, by definition, you are going to have greater uncertainty. You are taking less time to gather and analyze information before acting. An MVP is meant to allow you to quit or change things before you put too much time or effort into a course of action, all while speeding up the information-gathering process so crucial to good decision-making.

As the world changes, we should be quitting stuff that isn't working or is no longer what people want or what we want. We should be surveying the landscape, both to understand when that may happen as well as to find something better we can turn our attention to.

Deciding which hands are worth playing and which hands are not is the first and most consequential choice a player makes. And pros are just better at that choice, playing a mere 15% to 25% of the two-card starting combinations they are dealt in Texas Hold'em. Compare that to an amateur, who will stick with their starting cards over half the time.

Chapter 1 Summary • 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 might have been. • Having the option to quit helps you to explore more, learn more, and ultimately find the right things to stick with.

Quit While You Still Have a Choice Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early. If you quit on time, it's not going to seem like anything particularly dire is happening at that particular moment. That's because quitting is a problem of being able to glimpse at the range of ways the future might play out and see that the likelihood that things will turn out poorly is too high to make it worth your while to continue.