Celebrate wise quitting
Dan Murphy, September 24 2023
Know when to hold 'em and know when to fold 'em
A book that’s been on my to-read list for a long time is Quit by Annie Duke, one of my favorite non-fiction authors. After becoming the first woman to win the World Series of Poker Main Event she has written a series of books focused on how to make better decisions.
Her writing offers a deep dive into the various cognitive biases that plague our decision making processes, and tactics we can employ to help mitigate those biases¹.
I liked Quit so much, and find it so applicable to the worlds of business and tech, that I want to parrot a few of its key ideas here. While I think doing so can offer a helpful glimpse into the ideas Duke has explored in her book, really you should pick up a copy and read it to get the full benefit of her thinking.
The stigma of quitting
One obstacle to effective decision making that seems obvious upon consideration, but which can easily lay hidden in our subconscious, is how lavishly glorified not giving up is. I find this to be particularly true in the world of start-ups.
There are countless tales of the valiant founder who stuck out tough times for years, who persisted through failure after failure, who endured misery, to in the end be justly rewarded for their heroic feat of perseverance.
The story says everyone else doubted them and their idea, and only by ignoring that noise and continuing on at great personal cost could they emerge triumphant.
The implication from this kind of tale is that everyone who gave up - the competitors who shut down, the employees who left, the investors who refused a follow-on round - were not only wrong, but were lacking the fortitude and character of those who persisted.
This is the stigma of quitting. That it’s bad to quit. That you’ll never succeed if you quit - just look at those successes who didn’t quit! That you’re short-sighted or lacking in toughness if you quit.
Of course this is only an illusion, and even the most gentle application of logic can dissolve it. As Duke points out, by definition if you succeed at something you have not quit it, you’ve stuck it out. But that doesn’t mean that by sticking with something you will succeed.
In domains like entrepreneurship the odds are massively stacked against this being the case. Despite being smart and having a reasonable idea and perhaps even a big pile of money that allows you to delay the upcoming failure, most of the time you will fail. That is empirically true.
It’s easy to see this stigma at play. Simply look at the way anyone talks about quitting. We are loath to say “this was a bad idea, I can see now that I have better ways to spend my time, I’m quitting.” or even “this was a good idea when I started out, but things have changed and it’s no longer working out for me. I’ve decided to quit so I can pursue greener pastures.”
Instead you get “I’m starting a new chapter”, “I’m taking the next step in my journey” or similar evasion.
I’m personally as guilty of this as anyone. It doesn’t feel good to say “I’m quitting.”.
Quit explores in great detail the factors that make it so hard to give up², but perhaps the only evidence you need is your own lived experience. No one wants to be a quitter. Everyone wants to be the intrepid hero who kept going no matter how hard it got.
This is especially problematic when your identity - your notion of who you are - is caught up in the decision to quit. Maybe you think of yourself as a founder, or a scientist, or a designer. Even if you’re miserable in that role, it feels almost terrifying to give up and therefore imply that you’re no longer the thing you once proudly identified as.
When quitting is wise
Is this to say we should quit whenever the going gets tough? No. It’s to say that we should be principled and dispassionate in our decisions to quit.
Why? Because there can be a great cost to not quitting. Specifically there can be great opportunity cost. While you are doing Thing A you are devoting time and energy that you cannot devote to something else, to Thing B. Duke put it this way: by not quitting Thing A you are also quitting Thing B. The decision is merely passive rather than active.
What if Thing A is a long shot and Thing B is a sure thing? You still may want to do Thing A! It may be a long shot with a huge payoff if you succeed, whereas Thing B may be a surefire way to be unsatisfied.
The point is to think in expected value, whether that value is tangible or intangible. How likely is my endeavor to succeed, and what does it give me - socially, emotionally, financially, intellectually - if it does? What does it cost me if it fails?
The greater the expected value of the opportunity cost, the more tragic the decision to not quit a losing game becomes.
What a waste it would be for a talented, passionate person to never engage with an opportunity to make an impact or do their life’s work because they refuse to quit a different opportunity to do so, even though the world has shown them it is very likely to fail.
How to quit
The social stigma and cognitive biases associated with quitting make it difficult to do so rationally. But Quit highlights several tactics that can help. One that I’ve personally found helpful is setting up Kill Criteria.
These are conditions that you set out in advance of engaging with some endeavor³, and you commit to quitting if those conditions are satisfied by some pre-determined point.
I’ve used this in developing business ideas with criteria such as:
- If 1 month from now we do not have contact info for 50 prospective customers, we should quit.
- If 1 month after building the prospect list we have not scheduled or held calls with 20 of the prospects we should quit.
- If we do not close sales with 5 of the 20 prospects within 2 months we should quit.
Why would we quit rather than persevere? Not because there’s no possibility of success, but because there are other ideas to be tested. Perhaps they are far more tractable, and we’ll never know if we refuse to change course when the world provides feedback.
Kill Criteria don’t have to be completely black-and-white. If you miss a criterion by a very narrow margin, or if there is legitimately new information that comes to light that merits amending the criteria, so be it.
But don’t delude yourself. If you consistently fall short of your Kill Criteria, isn’t that telling you something? You should take that information seriously.
Kill Criteria are most effective when you share them with someone external to the endeavor. If you are only reviewing your Kill Criteria with your teammate, or worse, only with yourself, it’s easy to rationalize away why you missed the mark.
Having to explain to a third party why you should keep going despite not satisfying your own benchmarks makes it much harder to deceive yourself.
Reversability
One thing to keep in mind in making these decisions is how reversable they are. Some things can be quit and later returned to, others cannot. Set your Kill Criteria accordingly. If quitting is irrevocable, you may wish to set more strigent criteria.
Celebrate wise quitting
One thing I’ve taken from Duke’s work is that I want to help combat the stigma of giving up when something just isn’t working. I want to recognize the courage, honesty and wisdom it takes to make a reasoned decision about giving up, and to celebrate those that manage to do so.
I don’t want to be captive to the fear of being a perceived as a quitter, when quitting truly is the best course of action, and when doing so will free me to pursue more fruitful opportunities.
There should be no shame in that.
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Footnotes
- Unlike many pop-psych authors, she actually cites studies that have been widely replicated.
- Among them: sunk cost fallacy, endowment effect, not being accustomed to thinking about opportunity costs and expected value, and the cognitive dissonance arising from quitting some part of our identity.
- This is a form of a pre-committment contract.