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 results of this paper suggest that people may be excessively cautious when facing life-changing choices.” The corollary of this is also true. When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call.

The endowment effect adds more mass to the katamari, beyond what is already added by the sunk cost effect. As you start on a course of action and as you make subsequent decisions to continue on that course of action, not only are you accumulating more sunk costs, but you’re becoming more endowed to your ideas, to the belief that you’re on the right

Chapter 2 Summary Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early. The hardest time to make a quitting decision is when you’re in it. Our intuition is that quitting will slow down our progress. The reverse is actually true. If you walk away from something that is no longer worthwhile, that frees you up to switch to something that is more lik

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

we’re all in a cult of our own identity.

within a year, she had put together a cross-agency group of behavioral scientists, policy experts, and program makers, founding and chairing the White House’s first-ever Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. When Obama left office in January 2017, Shankar also departed, moving on to become Google’s global director of behavioral science. In 2021, she

If you are going to gaff the scale against quitting by adding endowment into the mix, at least make the thing you’ve become endowed to something that represents real progress at solving a hard problem.

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