Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

ants have it better than humans, because they’re a colony, a collection of individuals working together. This makes it easier for ants to explore and exploit at the same time. Some of the ants follow the pheromone trail, while other ants explore new food sources. Even if the ants along the pheromone trail are myopic, it doesn’t matter to the colony

Our lives are better if we have a larger portfolio of skills and opportunities available to us.

incredible work in applied behavioral economics that was happening in the government, specifically using the power of defaults to encourage positive behavior. These defaults are known as nudges, made famous in the bestseller Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein.

When a goal is all-or-nothing, your choices are essentially not to start or stick to the goal no matter what.

One of the goals for all of us should be to, as much as possible, maximize the diversification of interests, skills, and opportunities in each of our portfolios.

Don’t come to college dead set on only one major. Think about several majors that have features or future career paths that might interest you. When you’re choosing courses, pick the ones that satisfy a requirement for as many majors as possible. That will help you maximize the number of options open to you and diversify the skill sets that you’re

The lesson here is that we shouldn’t wait to be forced to find a Plan B. We should always be doing some exploration, especially because sometimes Plan B can turn out to be better than the thing you’re already pursuing.

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 a

while goals do help us to be grittier, grit isn’t always a virtue. As you already know, grit is good for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, but grit also gets you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile.