Quit

You’re already familiar with the problem of opportunity cost neglect. Goal setting can exacerbate this issue. Once we settle on a finish line and a path to get us there, we become myopic, failing to explore other paths that might be available to us or other finish lines that might be better for us to head toward.

This is why having kill criteria is so important. When you set a goal, creating a list of kill criteria gives you the unlesses that you need to be more rational about when it’s the right time to walk away.

Progress along the way should count for something, but we discard it because goals are pass-fail, all-or-nothing, yes-or-no. There’s no partial credit given.

a broken leg won’t make us quit when facing the choice between falling short

Finish lines are funny things. You either reach them or you don’t. You either succeed or you fail. There is no in between. Progress along the way matters very little.

It’s not always the world that changes. Sometimes, it’s you that changes.

What is true for grit is true for optimism. Optimism gets you to stick to things that are worthwhile. But optimism also gets you to stick to things that are no longer worthwhile. And life’s too short to do that.

A survey of three thousand entrepreneurs found that 81% of founders put their odds of success at 70% or better and a third of founders put their odds of success at 100%! Given that only about one in ten of the ambitious ventures Conway invests in generates a positive return, that optimism borders on the delusional.

Once you have a history with a choice, with all the accumulated debris that goes along with that, you will be subject to the forces that make it hard to walk away.