Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

While grit can get you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, grit can also get you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile.

We need to start thinking about waste as a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one. That means realizing that spending another minute or another dollar or another bit of effort on something that is no longer worthwhile is the real waste.

We have already explored some strategies for achieving this: identify the hard part and tackle that first to avoid false progress; think about the conditions under which you would quit well in advance of having to face that decision down; create precommitment contracts and kill criteria. We now turn our attention to another strategy: Get outside he

As we carry around beliefs and ideas, they become our possessions. We own what we’ve bought and what we’ve thought.

Lindsey Vonn,

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

our psychology puts a thumb on the scale such that by the time we think the options of quitting and sticking are 50-50, it’s not even in the vicinity.

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

The endowment effect is particularly strong if the thing you own you also built. This is known as the IKEA effect, for obvious reasons. Most furniture you buy from IKEA, you have to put together yourself. We’ll value that nightstand that we built much more than an identical one that was preassembled.