the world is stochastic. That’s just a fancy way of saying that 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,

Whether it is your own actions or new and disconfirming information, when it comes to a battle between the facts and changing your beliefs, the facts too often lose out.

That’s the way that we need to think too. When we find something that’s working for us, whether it’s a job, a career, a product that we’re developing, a business strategy, or even a favorite restaurant that we love going to, continuing to explore what other options might be available is a good strategy in a world as uncertain as the one that we

Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.

Chapter 9 Summary Optimism makes you less likely to walk away while not actually increasing your chances of success. That means that being overly optimistic will make you stick to things longer that aren’t worthwhile. Better to be well calibrated. Life’s too short to spend your time on opportunities that are no longer worthwhile. When someone is on

“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.

John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the twentieth century, summed up this phenomenon well when he said, “Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.” Succeeding unconventionally carries with it the risk of experiencing failure as a result of veering from

Quit while you’re ahead … when the game you are playing or the path you are on is a losing proposition. If you are in a situation that carries with it a negative expected value, by all means quit. But keep going when you have a positive expected value.

You can’t trick yourself into not taking sunk costs into account by trying to view the situation as a new choice. Asking whether or not you would continue if the decision were a fresh one doesn’t mitigate the sunk cost effect the way you might intuitively think it would.