If you feel like you’ve got a close call between quitting and persevering, it’s likely that quitting is the better choice.

When he followed up with the coin flippers two and six months later, he discovered that for the big life decisions, people who quit were happier on average than people who stuck, whether they quit on their own or after the coin flipped in favor of quitting.

Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress.

Getting Feedback on the Things You Don’t Do

INTERLUDE III The Ants Go Marching . . . Mostly

But as Carey Morewedge and Colleen Giblin pointed out in a 2015 review of the literature, we can become endowed to much more than physical objects. As the research on the endowment effect has expanded, it has become increasingly clear that we can also become endowed to our beliefs, our ideas, and our decisions. As we carry around beliefs and ideas,

Paper Gains and Paper Losses

If leaders act like success is just whether you hit the target or goal or deadline, then the people they’re leading are going to learn pretty quickly that they need to get across the finish line at all costs. They won’t speak up if they think the goal isn’t worth pursuing any longer. They’re going to be unwilling to quit even when the situation war

SECTION I The Case for Quitting