When to Quit
Episode Stats
Summary
Don't be a quitter. Quitters never win, and winners never quit. These maxims encapsulate our usual attitude towards quitting, which is that quitting is a bad thing, a weakness, and a character defect. We celebrate those who stick with things, we have grit, but my guests would say that quit and grit are just two sides of the same coin, and that quitting can be a valuable skill to learn and get good at. In her latest book, "Quitting the Power of Knowing When to Walk Away," author Annie Duke seeks to rehabilitate quitting by showing how quitting has essential benefits.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast
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don't be a quitter quitters never win and winners never quit these maxims encapsulate
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our usual attitude towards quitting which deceit is a bad thing a weakness character defect we
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celebrate those who stick with things we have grit but my guests would say that quit and grit
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are just two sides of the same coin and that quitting is a valuable skill to learn and get
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good at her name is annie duke and she's a former professional poker player speaker consultant and
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an author in her latest book quit the power of knowing when to walk away she seeks to rehabilitate
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quitting by showing how whether it's in the context of ending a relationship leaving a job or climbing
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a mountain it has essential benefits we discuss those benefits in today's show as well as how to
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know when to quit we unpack how whether you should stick with something comes down to an equation of
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its positive expected value how setting goals too rigidly can get in the way of being able to assess
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that value and the cognitive biases that keep you from quitting when you should we enter conversation
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with two strategies for overcoming these biases including establishing kill criteria to give yourself
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a timetable for how long to go after a name after the show's over check out our show notes at awim.is
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all right annie duke welcome back to the show well thank you for having me back i think this is my third
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time this is your third time on the show and i've really enjoyed our previous conversations and your
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episodes have been big hits with our audience and i'm sure there's going to be another good one
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you got a new book out it's all about quitting and this is something you probably thought a lot about
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as a professional poker player uh you know thinking about when to fold them right but quitting is
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something that most people don't like to think about like to celebrate they don't feel good about it
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instead we like to talk about grit right we like we like the stories of people who persevered
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but something you start off the book with is saying that grit needs to be in conversation with quit
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and that they're two sides of the same coin so let's start off things there tell us more about
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this idea of grit and quit yeah so so i think that we think about you know grit and quit as opposing
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forces right and in that battle of the binary you know grit has clearly won the day we think about
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grit as a virtue and quit as a vice i mean just simply put like brett if if someone called you
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a quitter would you take it as a compliment no i wouldn't no no i mean they're clearly trying to
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insult you so you know we really sort of think about perseverance is synonymous with heroism or
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building character you know it's character building but the issue with thinking about those as
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opposing forces is that as you said they're actually the exact same decision so at any time that i've
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started something i have the choice to either continue or to walk away so if i choose to continue if i
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choose to persevere i'm by definition choosing not to quit and if i choose to quit i'm by definition
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choosing you know not to stick and so as we face that decision the factors that go into whether
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we stick or quit are the same because it really is the same decision but we don't think about it that
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way and what that means is that it's really absurd for us to have created this binary where like one is
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good and one is bad when something is the same decision and it's about the context because it's
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really easy for me to give you example after example after example where it's incredibly obvious that
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someone should quit and if they were to persevere in these circumstances that that would be folly
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that that would actually be a bad thing a like super simple example is if you're on a road where
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there's a huge accident and there's an exit right in front of you and you could take that exit and get
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on another road that's going to get you to your destination it would be silly to stay on the road where
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there's an accident and the traffic isn't moving so that's like a silly little example but there's all
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sorts of big big examples of that type of decision where you can very clearly see that quitting has
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to be the better choice as an example if you're on the top of everest and a snowstorm is rolling in
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is you're you know attempting the summit and we've all read those kinds of stories don't we think that it
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would be silly to continue up in those circumstances because you're almost definitely going to die
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right like you should obviously turn around in that situation so as i thought about that and i
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realized well look quitting is a skill that we ought to develop and get good at because it does depend
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on context and it is actually just the other side of the coin of grit and we need to get good at both
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of those in parallel and figure out when we should do one or the other thing right that that was really
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kind of what made me say like i need to write this book because my goal here is to rehabilitate the
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word to say it's okay to quit things because quitting is often the wisest choice when i i think when you
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that idea of that grit and quit are the two sides of the same coin i think i look at my life in order
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for me to persevere in some things means i have to quit other things right like i mean like i think back
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when i played sports as a kid there was a period where i was playing basketball and i was playing
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baseball and i was playing football and i remember when i was ninth grade tenth grade where i had to
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decide which one do i really need to focus on if i want to get good at it and it was football and so
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i didn't say i was quitting baseball and basketball or whatever and wrestling but i was uh yeah because i i in
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order for me to to focus on football and really persevere in that i had to quit the other stuff but i think
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that's funny i mean we quit all the time i mean think about all this stuff we all have hobbies that
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we as a kid that we did like i would i went through a magic phase but i don't do magic anymore because
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i wasn't any good at it and i didn't enjoy it and there's other things i found but instead of saying
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we quit we we you talk about how in our we tend to like change how we talk about quitting so it
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doesn't sound like quitting it's like well i shifted my focus or i'm pivoting right but we quit
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all the time yeah we hate the word quitting so much that we have a like a whole like a huge variety
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of euphemisms for it like starting a new chapter or you know shifting my focus as you said or the big
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one is pivot pivot yeah i'm pivoting and it's really interesting like there's an example that i have in
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my book about lindsey vaughn and then recently serena williams did the same thing where you have people
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who have shown a tremendous amount of grit like clearly nobody nobody can question their ability
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to persevere right and to stick to it and yet when they make the decision to retire they say i'm not
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quitting so lindsey vaughn you know announces like i've decided that i'm gonna stop skiing okay stopping
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is quitting right i have to listen to my body which is telling me that you know it's broken and i really
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can't continue but uh i'm not quitting and for all the kids out there like never give up right and and
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it's so jarring and then serena williams just did the same thing where she said like i'm not quitting
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i'm heading down a new path or something like that and you just look at these things and you say
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what is going on like they're demonstrably quitting they're retiring from the game
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that's quitting but why are they so unwilling to say the word and it's like i i say like quitting
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gets the valdemort treatment right like the word that shall that shall not be named right so we want
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to talk around it and not actually say that we're doing the thing that we're actually doing and and to
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your point what a silliness and by the way angela duckworth who wrote grit the power of passion and
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perseverance i think really agrees with this like i i think that you know it may seem like oh i'm
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having a disagreement with her but i actually have no disagreement with her whatever i i think that
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people misinterpret her work as like perseverance is just good and it's character building but her
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point is that you have to explore a lot of stuff and then find the thing that you're passionate about
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and then be willing to stick to that even if it's hard but what she would never tell people to do
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is stick to hard things that aren't worthwhile you know so your story about well you tried a bunch of
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different sports so you were exploring different sports and then you had to decide what is the
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thing that i'm really going to you know spend my time on and i have to quit the rest in order to be
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able to do that is a good example of how someone can be gritty and quitty at the same time because we
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have limited time and limited resources and limited attention that we can devote to anything at one single
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time so you have to figure out what are the things that aren't worth my time so i can quit those to
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free up those resources to turn your attention to things that are worth your time and so most people
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who are really good at quitting are also quite gritty in fact they view the point of doing the quitting
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in order to be able to have to free themselves up to persevere at the things that really matter
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okay so yeah let's talk about i mean the benefits of quitting we've kind of been
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talking around it but it one thing it allows you to focus more of your time on the things that
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matter to you any other benefits that of quitting that we overlook when we think about quitting
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the primary function of quitting is to help you deal with uncertainty so imagine if you were
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omniscient not just omniscient so you knew everything there was to know but you also could see into the
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future then you know quitting wouldn't be such a valuable skill because when you chose to do
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something you know you would be choosing something that was probably going to continue to be great
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going forward you know likely just because things change you you may want to do some quitting in the
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future but it would be less valuable because you wouldn't be deciding under so much uncertainty
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in other words there wouldn't be so much information discovery occurring after the fact after you
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actually started something but that is not the world that humans live in we are neither omniscient
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nor time travelers and so what that means is that whenever we enter into any course of action whenever
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we choose to start something we're choosing to start something with very little information and a strong
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influence of luck on on the way it's going to turn out like think about something as simple as a decision
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to hire somebody right you have a few interviews with them and maybe like two references
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and then you hire them and obviously that's very little information you know you're going to find
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out a lot about that person after they're actually in the job right are they good at it are they bad at
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it you know so on so forth this is true like very simply in poker like i start a hand and then i'm going
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to find out all sorts of new stuff like my opponent is going to take certain actions they're going to
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tell me something more about what they're holding and then there are going to be new cards that come
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and i need to have the option to be able to quit in order to deal with that in order to be able to enter
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into that decision so quitting is what allows us to do that because imagine like imagine if the first
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date you went on you had to marry that person it would be so hard to ever make a decision about who
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to go on a date with because the stakes would be so high because you you wouldn't be able to get out
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of it but we can get out of it and so you can go on lots of dates so that's really like the primary
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function and primary benefit of quitting but then when we sort of say okay so we have this option
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to quit when we quit what does it allow us to do well it allows us to get off paths that aren't
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really worthwhile in other words we we start things all the time that it turns out are not causing us
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to advance toward our goals in the way that we thought they would so maybe we're not gaining as
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much ground as we had hoped or maybe we're actually losing ground and we find that out after we've started
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the thing so what quitting does is allows you to stop doing that thing and go do something that
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is going to cause you to gain more ground toward your goal and in that sense we can see where people
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really have it wrong about quitting most people when they think about quitting they think it's going
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to stop their progress it's going to cause you to lose ground well that's only true if you're quitting
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something that's worthwhile but if you're quitting well and quitting the things where after you've
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started them you sort of discover you know what this isn't really getting me to where i want to go
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very fast or maybe it's actually causing me to lose ground so i'm going backwards now if you quit it will
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get you to where you want to go faster because it allows you to switch to something that is going to
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cause you to gain ground toward your goals and that's something that i want people to really understand
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and internalize that quitting doesn't stop your progress it speeds you up it allows you to get to
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where you want to go faster and that's why like one of the things i say is we have this thing like
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winners never quit and quitters never win what i say is no winners quit a lot and it's part of why they
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win because they're constantly trying to get on the best path that's available to them and so yeah this
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idea this is bringing the economic stuff that you you research with quitting when we make a decision to
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quit or continue we're using what's called expected value correct yeah so expected value simply put is
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if you compare the long run uh cost to the long run benefits are you net positive right so like i said
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a very simple way to explain expected value is if we were betting on a coin flip and heads you win
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tails i lose and when you win i give you two dollars and when you lose you give me one dollar
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that would be a positive expected value bet for you because we know that you're going to win the bet 50
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percent of the time and so when you win half the time you're going to get two dollars so we can
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multiply 50 by two dollars and that means that's a one dollar long term win for you and then half the
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time you're going to lose a dollar and so 50 of a dollar is 50 cents and so now we can take that
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gross earnings that dollar that you're going to earn in the long run against that 50 cents that
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you're going to lose and you can see that for every dollar that you're risking on every flip you're
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actually going to make 50 cents now what's important to understand about expected value it's it's kind
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of a long run weighted average and so what that means is that notice that on no flip do you actually
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get 50 cents you either get two dollars or you give me a dollar right but if we do it like you
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know 10 000 times you're going to end up making 50 cents for every time that you bet so it'd be
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10 000 times 50 cents is what you would make some five thousand dollars so that would be pretty good
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you would like that um but expected value isn't just about like these bets or money you know like
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if i invest a dollar in a stock am i earning money on it uh expected value also has to do with
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you know how are we achieving our goals there are there are different types of benefits that we can
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achieve as human beings that aren't monetary things like happiness or health right if you're choosing
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to run a marathon there are things that that's costing you like time with your family some degree
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of expected physical discomfort but what you're getting in return for that is maybe the feeling of
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having accomplished something that very few people accomplish you know the physical fitness that comes
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with it you know that being in a flow state the feeling of that endorphin rush you know so on so
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forth we can think about what are the things that you're getting from deciding to train for a marathon
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versus what are the things that you're sacrificing and when you decide to start it what's implied
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is that you think that you're positive expected value that you're winning to that decision that the
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benefits are going to outweigh the costs right but what we need to realize is that when we're
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entering into a decision when we're deciding to start something we're making educated guesses
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about whether it is positive expected value whether you're going to win to that in the long run not
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only are we making educated guesses about that where maybe maybe our forecast was actually wrong but also
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the world things can change about the world and things can change about us so we can start a marathon
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and decide that the physical discomfort is worth it compared to the things that we're going to win
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but then maybe we break our leg in the middle of a marathon and then that expected value equation is
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going to shift based on that that new event that has occurred and we want to always be paying attention
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to that so that's essentially like if we get to the core of how do you figure out when it's right to quit
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versus when it's right to stick to something or persevere it's really a question of expected value
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right if the path that you're on is expected value particularly in comparison to other things
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you could be doing with the time and then you should you should probably continue even if it's
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really hard and if it's not then you should switch taking into account switching costs so this this
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requires like a lot of self-reflection and knowing what you want so i think sometimes you when you get
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stuck on a goal you forget about what you want you're like well i got this goal and i got to do it even
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though you don't you're really not getting any satisfaction out of it well i think this brings
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up actually a real problem with goals so you know goals obviously there's there's lots of research
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that said goals are good like i'm not telling people don't set goals having clear goals you know
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in this world of kpis and okrs right like having clear well-defined goals for people to try to achieve
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is a motivating factor it does help people to achieve those things more quickly and increases the
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probability that they'll do so but i think that we have to remember that there's a downside of goals
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and i think one of the best examples of that is a woman named siobhan o'keefe who was running in the
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2019 london marathon and somewhere around like mile three she started to experience a lot of pain
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in her leg and i think it was right around mile eight that her fibula snapped oh geez yeah so she broke
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her leg so i assume you know i mean like really broke her leg i i assume that you have the same
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intuition that that i do that if if that were to happen to you you would quit running you would just
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say whoops i guess i'm going to stop this marathon right because i just broke my leg but that is not
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what happened she actually continued to run despite the medical people telling her that she should stop
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and she finished the marathon now you might think you know oh that's super nutty that she did that
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that's got to be pretty rare but the fact is it's not rare actually three other people in that same
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marathon did the same thing broke something relatively early in the race and then continued
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and ran until the end and then if you just like do a google search of like you know people who break
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something but finish marathons you'll see that it's very well populated people are doing this all the
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time and if we talk about you know what we were saying before about you know if you're if you're
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doing something it can prevent you from doing other things and so there's a cost to that right
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so you want to be making sure that you're quitting the stuff that isn't worthwhile there's also another
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problem which is sometimes when you continue something it's going to stop you from being
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able to do that thing in the future so there are also future costs to that in the case of running a
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marathon you know from mile eight where you're now going to be running 18 more miles on that broken
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leg clearly you're increasing the probability that you may never actually run a marathon again
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because that injury is now going to become more and more severe there's no question that you're
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increasing the length of recovery and so you're going to sacrifice some time and it may be significant
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time and being able to pursue something that you clearly love so the question is you know it goes so
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counter to our intuition as to why would someone continue run when they have a broken leg and so
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why is that like why do we why does that break our intuition so badly and that the answer really is
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because there's a finish line and that's really what a goal is right so when you start a marathon
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there's a finish line it's 26.2 miles and here's the problem with goals there's a few of them
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the first one is that they're graded pass fail so if you complete eight miles of a marathon
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you've failed in fact if you complete 25 miles of a marathon you have failed never mind that you ran
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25 miles more than most people right so let me let me just ask you this because I think that it's important
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to kind of get at this intuition so which would feel worse to you Brett let's imagine that you
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determined that you had no interest ever in running a marathon and so you like stayed on the couch
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and watched you know television or you know obsessed about the news or something or or you read a billion
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non-fiction books while sitting on the couch which may be part of what you spend your time on so imagine
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that that that was that version of Brett and imagine another version of Brett who decides that you want
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to run the marathon a marathon so let's say you want to run say the New York City marathon
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and you train for it which involves a lot of running and you go out on that day to run the marathon
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and you get injured on mile 16 so severely that you can't continue and you so you have to stop running
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so you have to quit which feels worse never having tried at all or having started the marathon and
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having to walk away on mile 16 well I know my intuition would be like the quitting would feel worse
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right right and so I you know and I don't know anybody who doesn't have that intuition and think
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about how weird that is because in one version of Brett you never ran a mile but the other version of
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Brett ran many many miles so isn't the other version of Brett like more accomplished at least as it comes
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to that of course but the problem with the version of Brett that stopped on mile 16 is that you were
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10.2 miles short of the finish line so therefore you failed because there is no in-between and so this is
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the issue that we have with goals and we have to be very careful about it is that the minute that you set
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a goal you also start that's the moment that you start so now you have a starting line and a finish
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line and as soon as you step your toe over the starting line you are now at least cognitively
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what we would call in the losses this is a term that Richard Taylor uses a lot so in the losses means
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that we are we have some sort of loss on paper at that moment so when you're 16 miles into a race
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we can see that sort of in reality from an object objective standpoint you have gained 16 miles
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16 miles more than from when you started but cognitively that's not how we do it because being
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in the losses is a cognitive phenomenon and from you know our own cognition is is processing that as
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being in the losses in other words 10.2 miles in the losses because we measure that the way that we
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sort of feel about losses and gains is in relation to our destination not in relation to where we
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started from and as Richard Thaler likes to point out we do not like to close mental accounts in the
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losses that's a just a fancy way for saying we don't like to stop short of finish lines and we will do
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everything that we can to not do that and what that means is that even in a case where the goal is no
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longer worthwhile we will continue toward it we will keep running with a broken leg we'll stay in a
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relationship that is uh toxic we'll stay in a job that we hate that we're miserable in because we
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don't want to have to close that account as a failure so that that's like piece number one that's
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kind of a problem with goals and then what goes along with this pass fail nature of goals is that goals
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are also fixed objects so what do i mean by that well you know we talked about cost benefit analysis
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and these expected value calculations when you set a goal you're doing that cost benefit analysis so
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you're saying in terms of the things that i'm trying to achieve i'm going to have this goal or this okr
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or whatever and this is what i think is going to cause me to to be on a path that's positive expected
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value that's going to get me to actually produce the things that i'd like to produce in my
00:25:11.020
life which may just be happiness right and so you go through that expected value calculation like
00:25:15.960
and when you decide to run a marathon you're doing that right like what are the things this is going
00:25:20.480
to cost me what are the things that i'm going to gain from this okay this seems like a reasonable
00:25:25.360
goal to set in relation to the things that i'm trying to gain and the things that i'm willing to cost
00:25:30.800
myself and so now i'm going to start and i'm going to head down that path toward that goal
00:25:34.520
the problem is that once we set the goal it's a little bit set it and forget it
00:25:38.860
as marie schweitzer of the wharton school says i think he says this really well goals are fixed
00:25:44.300
objects in a changing world so what happens is that we sort of make our best guess under uncertainty
00:25:49.860
about what is going to be the best goal to set in terms of what we're trying to achieve
00:25:54.700
and then once we start on it the goal itself becomes the object and it's a fixed object despite
00:26:00.840
the fact that the world might be changing and we might be changing and it stops us from taking that
00:26:06.120
stuff into account because we're just sort of like heading toward the goal come what may and so
00:26:11.940
you know i think that people have to be careful when they're setting goals to realize that this is the
00:26:16.320
case and then start thinking about how can you create more flexibility in your goals so that you
00:26:22.060
can react more rationally to like breaking your leg in the middle of a race we're gonna take a quick
00:26:27.400
break for your word from our sponsors and now back to the show you highlight some other cognitive biases
00:26:36.860
that make it hard for us to quit sunk cost fallacies status quo bias the endowment effect even our sense
00:26:43.300
of identity can make it hard to quit and there's this great example you found really obscure business
00:26:49.300
story i think the guy was named sta right his last name was sta yeah yeah he owned this he opened up this
00:26:55.280
chain of stores was a success but then he just had a hard time quitting when he should have and i think
00:27:02.440
it was a confluence of these biases that get in the way can you talk about this and like what this
00:27:06.620
example highlights about why it's so hard to quit sometimes yeah so i mean i just want to say sort
00:27:12.380
of off the top here that i think that we have the intuition that after we start something when we get
00:27:18.800
signals from the world that tell us that we should stop we will you know like i think we have the
00:27:24.940
intuition that if you're running a marathon and you break your leg you're going to stop running
00:27:27.780
so but that that intuition is wrong and harold sta i think is such a great example of showing
00:27:33.640
that not only do we not pay attention to the negative signals but we actually tend to escalate
00:27:37.820
our commitment to the cause in other words we we double down we redouble our efforts in what we're
00:27:43.340
doing so harold sta moved to california with his family when he was a young kid in the late 40s
00:27:51.220
there he met his future wife shirley and they moved to the inland empire and this was during a period of
00:28:01.160
boom so this was in the 50s so this was like post-war america when there was obviously a big
00:28:06.560
economic boom so they sort of got some you know they sort of scratched together some money and they
00:28:13.560
bought a little storefront that at one point had actually housed chickens and so they went in and they
00:28:18.840
like you know swept out all of the feathers and whatnot and they started a store and it did really
00:28:26.280
well pretty quickly he got to move out of the air sets chicken coop because he started to open some
00:28:31.860
other locations he renamed the store as the abc stores so you could think about it as like kind of
00:28:37.280
like a kmart that's sort of where he ends up that's what the stores were like so household goods and
00:28:43.180
appliances and sort of anything that you could imagine he actually then leases a 50,000 square
00:28:49.560
foot property in montclair and there he not only has his stores but he's also sort of like almost like
00:28:56.320
a mall he's got booths or storefronts that he's leasing out now to other people like comp usa and
00:29:02.500
whatnot and so it's it's it's becoming pretty big and he's moving west there's a highway being built
00:29:07.340
connecting the inland empire to la and he starts to move west toward la and eventually even ends up
00:29:13.840
with locations in la so he was a pretty big retailer and very successful and at some point he gets
00:29:20.620
offered a merger with a similar chain that's in texas called sage stores so now they merged and
00:29:28.380
because i think staub was sort of the bigger chain he ends up being the the ceo of the whole darn thing
00:29:34.120
harold staub's stock was worth i think about three million dollars okay so he's a rich guy he's he's
00:29:40.460
built a business from a basically a chicken coop into this this huge business worth where his his worth
00:29:48.000
is is three million dollars but what happens at this time is that you know as i've mentioned kmart
00:29:55.260
this is when kmart which started off as ss creche starts to sort of expand across the country and
00:30:01.940
particularly in california they start they start to have a lot of stores and it starts to impinge on
00:30:07.560
the abc stores business at this time walmart is in arkansas and it has not sort of moved out of
00:30:15.180
there so sage is not experiencing the same problems so kmart is kind of crowding abc stores out but the
00:30:22.080
sage stores are booming so what happens is that the california stars stores the abc stores harold harold
00:30:29.420
stores start to become kind of lost leaders and the shareholders come and say we want to sell off
00:30:37.420
all of the california locations and just concentrate on the texas locations which makes sense right you
00:30:43.580
have one part of the business that's making money that's booming the texas part of the business
00:30:47.400
but the california business because of kmart is starting to lose money and harold says no he doesn't
00:30:55.460
want to do that he not only says no in the face of that very clear evidence but he says no in sort of
00:31:02.040
like the unkindest cut of all which is when he finally gets sued to force his hand to sell these
00:31:09.300
stores his lawyer switches sides and represents the shareholders so basically like his lawyers and his
00:31:18.800
lawyer and one of his best friends ends up suing him over this and yet he still stubbornly sticks to
00:31:25.160
his opinion that that you should you know that this is that he was unwilling to sell these stores he ends
00:31:30.920
up getting pushed out and they separate in a deal where basically he kind of gets his stores back
00:31:36.600
and that's what he kind of takes out of it he gets his stores back and he abandons any interest in
00:31:44.380
the sage stores and then it just kind of goes from there you know the stores are losing money
00:31:50.620
he had obviously built up a significant personal fortune that he starts to you know dump into the
00:31:57.260
stores to try to keep them afloat other independent retailers are starting to go out of business
00:32:03.260
because of kmart and instead of just sort of allowing that to happen he starts to buy those stores
00:32:09.800
that are clearly in trouble so that's sort of that escalation of commitment doubling down on the
00:32:15.320
cause even though the signs are very clear that things aren't going well and you're losing money
00:32:19.860
and then eventually i think somewhere around 1970 ish fred meyer who's a very big retailer
00:32:25.520
based out of oregon decided that they want to get it wanted to get a foothold in california
00:32:30.760
and they made harold a buyout offer for his stores which at this point you know i mean he's
00:32:36.140
dumping his personal fortune into here he's he's just losing money at this point
00:32:39.700
and he refuses that as well because he doesn't think the offer is high enough
00:32:43.280
you know and eventually all of the stores go bankrupt and the only thing he ends up being
00:32:48.580
left with is that big sort of lease that was sort of a lifetime lease on that property in montclair
00:32:54.800
which is the way that he ends up sustaining himself until his death in i think the 2000s
00:32:59.980
so and he just sort of sustained himself by you know leasing that space out to other retailers
00:33:05.620
so it's a real kind of like rags to riches to rag story but what's so weird about it is that he had
00:33:13.640
so many opportunities to save himself right i mean the signs were all there yeah and so like you said
00:33:21.780
this there's a lot going on with this guy probably there was some sunk cost fallacy right he probably
00:33:26.420
he was probably thinking well if i give up everything we work for the chicken coop and all that struggling
00:33:32.220
it would have been in vain if if we if we give up on this thing there's this idea of the endowment
00:33:36.780
effect like we we prefer things that we already own even if it's garbage like we we like our garbage
00:33:44.080
and so he's like he had he was invested like this is my my store i can't give up on it because it's
00:33:48.280
mine i'm sure his identity was tied up with his these stores idea this is like i've i've been doing
00:33:53.920
this since i was just a poor guy if i give up on it i'm giving up on a part of me so i can't do that
00:34:00.080
and so all these things contributed him to just to escalate as you said even when all the signs
00:34:05.820
were saying he should give up and i'm sure all of us have experienced something like that to some
00:34:10.220
extent in our lives yeah so you know i mean i think that one of the things that you touched on that that
00:34:15.200
is really important here is the endowment effect so the endowment effect is basically things you own
00:34:21.740
you value more than identical things that you don't own so it's kind of simple that way so you know i
00:34:28.700
mean i think we've all experienced that like you know you have a car and you you're thinking about
00:34:32.620
selling it and you look at the kelly blue book and you think the price that they're that they say
00:34:36.680
that your car is worth is completely absurd but when you go to buy an identical car you think that
00:34:41.580
the that the person is asking too much right right so okay so that doesn't make a lot of sense
00:34:47.480
and i think that you can see this endowment effect with harold stoss so clearly right because the
00:34:52.980
question is why when the california stores were failing and the texas stores were booming
00:34:57.700
and remember he was ceo of the whole thing okay so he has an interest in in in all of this right
00:35:04.480
why did he was he so stubborn that he would not sell off those california stores and the reason is
00:35:17.100
because those were the things that he really owned right those were the things that he built
00:35:21.720
and when we build things we have a particular ownership over them so he was endowed to the
00:35:28.400
california stores in a way that he was not endowed to the texas stores which was not an empire that he
00:35:33.880
himself built and we can see that again reoccur when fred meyer gives him the offer and he thinks the
00:35:41.020
offer is too low because he thinks that what he has what he built is worth more than other people from
00:35:48.180
the outside might might see it and this then causes him to to escalate his commitment uh not sell not
00:35:56.160
quit you know not just say let's go with the texas stores and a lot of it is is is because that is the
00:36:03.620
thing that he built separate and apart from that as you said we have this problem of of thinking about
00:36:09.520
waste as as sort of a backward looking issue as opposed to a forward looking issue so when we quit
00:36:14.660
things we think we're going to have wasted all the time and effort and money that we put into
00:36:18.460
something right and i'm sure you've had that feeling before you know where people will say
00:36:22.940
that right like why haven't you broken up with this person well because i put so much time and effort and
00:36:27.460
i don't want that to be wasted why haven't you quit the job well because onboarding was so hard and now i
00:36:33.640
know the ropes and i don't want to have wasted all of that work but the problem is that waste is not a
00:36:40.180
backward looking problem those those costs are already sunk it's a forward looking problem
00:36:44.220
does it make sense for me to put another dollar another minute or another bit of effort into the
00:36:50.440
thing that i'm doing that's what you ought to care about but that's not the way we think about it
00:36:54.280
so if we go back to harold staw it's like yeah okay so he put a lot of time and effort and a lot of
00:36:59.440
money and so on so forth into building that empire but the question is is it is it does it make sense
00:37:04.220
for him to do that going forward but we're very bad at looking going forward instead we think about
00:37:11.200
what we've already put into it and making a decision about whether to continue and then there's a very
00:37:16.240
you know big issue of identity because really in the end the hardest thing to quit is who you are
00:37:21.760
and the more that we make decisions around sticking to something particularly when we're now taking a
00:37:30.160
non-consensus decision the more that our identity gets wrapped up into it and then when we buck
00:37:37.860
everybody else to make a decision to continue again it kind of snowballs and our identity becomes more
00:37:43.400
and more entangled in whatever it is that we're doing and you can see that with harold staw as well
00:37:49.160
you know he builds the stores and then uh they're telling him at sage that you know everybody can see
00:37:56.460
that you ought to give it up and he makes a very non-consensus difficult decision he breaks up with
00:38:01.360
one of his best friends over it in order to hold on to the california stores and you can see how that
00:38:07.480
becomes a choice that really defines who you are and that's something that you find quite a bit like
00:38:12.300
if i believe that the earth revolves around the sun it's not really part of my identity because
00:38:17.800
everybody believes that so then if i get information to the contrary it's really not hard for me to change
00:38:23.540
my belief but if i believe something that's very non-consensus like i don't know the earth is flat
00:38:29.620
i can present you with all sorts of evidence that that's not true and what's going to happen is that
00:38:36.040
you're going to tend to reject the evidence as opposed to change your belief because if you change
00:38:40.320
your belief you're abandoning a big part of your identity which is this non-consensus extreme thing
00:38:47.280
that you hold to be true that other people don't hold to be true so it is part of who you are
00:38:53.060
and you know i love this harold staw story just because it it kind of wraps all of that stuff
00:38:58.700
into it but the other thing i really love about the harold staw story is it turns out his son barry
00:39:03.680
staw started doing research in the 1970s which really actually was some of the first work that
00:39:09.820
was done on this problem of escalation of commitment and so it was just really this really
00:39:14.380
cool connection that you know you had this amazing researcher who had done so much work on
00:39:21.200
showing this phenomenon that when we get bad news we don't abandon the cause we double down and become
00:39:28.900
grittier right so you've got this guy who that's his life's work and his father is harold staw
00:39:35.120
so one thing i've found when i've read books about cognitive biases that cause us to make
00:39:41.280
bad decisions is that even though i know that they exist there's like i don't i feel like there's
00:39:47.240
like knowing does not doesn't really do anything have you found that to be the case is like even
00:39:51.120
though you know about this stuff like okay we know this stuff exists what do you do about it like what
00:39:55.940
so like what how do you how do you overcome all this stuff so that you can quit when you need to
00:40:01.820
yeah this is actually where barry staw becomes so influential you know in the book which is first of
00:40:08.520
all he shows that you know knowing about it isn't particularly helpful but what he also shows
00:40:13.160
is that trying to do like a jedi mind trick where you say well i'm not going to worry about what i've
00:40:17.420
already put into it i'm just going to think about it going forward right like if you go like i know
00:40:22.040
i bought the stock at 50 and i i it's now at 40 but i'm not going to think about that i'm just going
00:40:27.660
to think about whether i'd buy it today which is actually something that people in finance say all
00:40:31.400
the time and he did some really beautiful work that showed that's not true uh you will take it into
00:40:37.660
account and just saying to yourself oh i'm going to treat it like a new decision what would i do if i were
00:40:43.040
starting this today does nothing to solve these problems of escalation commitment and sunk cost
00:40:48.880
and so on and so forth but he did find that there were two things that are really helpful and they
00:40:53.180
both relate to something which kahneman talks about a lot which is that the worst time to make a decision
00:40:57.980
is when you're in it so what does that mean when you're actually facing down the decision that's when
00:41:02.620
you're going to be at your decision making worst when you're actually facing the choice so what staw found
00:41:08.100
is that there's two strategies that can actually be really helpful the first is to think in advance
00:41:14.780
about what are those signals that i might see in the world that tell me that i ought to walk away
00:41:19.600
so it kind of goes back to what his point was when he was first thinking about this problem which is we
00:41:25.140
have the intuition that when we get those signals we're going to actually react to them and walk away
00:41:29.560
and that's not true so he says but what if you actually thought about what those signals were
00:41:34.400
beforehand instead of assuming that when you see them you'll notice it think in advance about what
00:41:39.820
those signals might be and then write those down and pre-commit to what the action is that you're
00:41:45.940
going to take and that that actually is really helpful the term that i use for this is kill criteria
00:41:51.320
one of my favorite examples of this type of thinking is called the turnaround time which they use in
00:41:57.200
mountain climbing so on everest when you go on summit day you're leaving at about midnight from camp
00:42:03.540
four to head toward the summit but they set a turnaround time before you ever start and that
00:42:08.300
turnaround time is 1 p.m and what a turnaround time means is that no matter where i am on the mountain
00:42:13.820
even if i haven't reached the summit if it's 1 p.m i have to turn around and the reason they do that is
00:42:20.920
that after 1 p.m you're basically the probability that something really terrible is going to happen
00:42:25.600
gets up too high because you're too likely to not reach what's called the southeast ridge
00:42:30.380
on the descent and daylight and that would be a very dangerous thing to do so they said they set
00:42:35.960
turnaround times of 1 p.m are people perfect in following these things no but more people follow
00:42:41.760
them than don't because you've actually thought about this in advance i've done that with sales
00:42:46.160
teams as well where we think about what the adverse signals are that you might see from say a lead that
00:42:51.440
you're pursuing something like in the first meeting they only wanted to talk about price they didn't even
00:42:55.960
want to know what your product was and we write those down as kill criteria and say if you see
00:43:00.900
those then you shouldn't pursue the lead anymore and that's really important because sellers who are
00:43:05.560
ready by nature um even if they go to the first meeting and the the prospect only wants to talk about
00:43:11.000
price they still think they can close the deal and now they're wasting time when they could be spending
00:43:16.160
that time on better more fruitful prospects so that's kind of the first thing you can do is sort of
00:43:21.980
think in advance and notice this gets you out of the decision the other thing that barry stahl found
00:43:26.940
is that you can get someone else to be the decider for you this is something that that kahneman says
00:43:33.340
he would call a quitting coach kahneman's quitting coach is richard thaler so i mean i'd like to have
00:43:39.360
richard thaler as my quitting coach but i don't but basically it's the idea that you know when we're in
00:43:44.760
it we don't see things very clearly but people from the outside looking in can see things very clearly
00:43:49.400
you know just as like when we're when i tell you the harold stahl story it's very easy for you to
00:43:54.360
see that well he should have quit when he had that offer to uh split up and sell off those california
00:44:01.360
stores and just concentrate on the texas stores like duh why didn't he do that because we can see
00:44:06.420
that from the outside we can see friends of ours who are in relationships where we're clearly they
00:44:11.820
should be breaking up and we know it we see friends in miserable jobs where we know that they should
00:44:16.800
stop doing it we see friends holding on to investments where we know that they should let
00:44:20.500
it go so on and so forth it's very easy to see it from the outside looking in but it's not so easy
00:44:24.900
from the inside looking out and so going and find somebody on the outside that can actually help you
00:44:30.860
and coach you toward those quitting decisions is super helpful so i can see this happening let's say
00:44:36.120
there's a career you're thinking about and you can set a kill criteria it's like i'll give myself
00:44:41.100
three years yeah and if i don't reach this this benchmark then i need to quit i knew someone who
00:44:46.800
they wanted to give theater a go and they gave themselves a deadline if i don't if i don't make
00:44:51.600
a career out of this where i'm getting paid regularly i can make a living by x date then i got to stop
00:44:56.780
and he ended up stopping and he went on to something else and he's successful there so i guess that first
00:45:01.880
thing just establish well for any goal you set out establish you know kill criteria where you're like
00:45:06.920
this is when i gotta stop yeah and the best kill criteria combine a state and a date which is what
00:45:12.760
your friend did if by this date i'm not in this state then then i need to quit one of the examples
00:45:19.420
that i love is you know which is similar to theater is if you get a phd in the humanities tenure track
00:45:26.360
positions are quite rare but if that's your goal then you should go and look up the average time it takes
00:45:33.200
for somebody a newly minted phd to get a tenure track position write that date down and literally
00:45:39.500
circle that date in your calendar and say if on that date i don't have a tenure track position
00:45:44.740
then i'm going to go and do something else and what that stops you from doing is that constant
00:45:49.960
you know feeling of making progress like so if we think about your friend with theater i'm sure that
00:45:55.280
he got some roles in between right and so then he gets a role he gets paid for it he thinks but i just
00:46:01.240
got a role i know that my success is just around the corner you know and then it's kind of not going
00:46:06.120
as planned but then he gets another role that kind of gives him hope and then it's like oh it's i know
00:46:10.760
i'm about to break through right and that can literally go on for 20 years where you always think you're
00:46:17.020
about to make it but by doing what your friend did you're tethering yourself in advance to reality
00:46:23.160
which is there's all sorts of things that can occur here that are going to feel like progress to me
00:46:28.540
but they're not actually enough progress you know when we go back to that idea of stick to hard
00:46:34.180
things that are worthwhile don't stick to hard things that aren't worthwhile what does it mean
00:46:38.740
to not be worthwhile it means that you're not making enough progress toward your goal and that
00:46:43.160
there are other things you can do that would help you to do that better so but there's all sorts of
00:46:47.960
things that give us the illusion of progress so for somebody who is you know a newly minted phd
00:46:54.700
they can do adjunct positions they can do postdocs they can do all these things that are making them
00:47:00.000
feel like they're making progress in their career but in relation to the actual goal that they have
00:47:05.220
which is to become a tenure track you know to secure a tenure track position they're really making no
00:47:10.360
progress at all but if you get that postdoc you know you're going to say okay i got another postdoc
00:47:17.800
this is great because i know this is going to be the end that's going to get me the job right and
00:47:22.560
then the job doesn't materialize and you get an adjunct position and then you rinse and repeat and
00:47:27.540
you say but now i've got an in with the university and i just know that when a position opens up at
00:47:32.300
this university because i'm doing such a good job they're going to take me you know and then that
00:47:36.100
doesn't happen and then you get another adjunct position you get and you can see how this can just
00:47:40.100
kind of go on forever if you haven't thought about it in advance and that's why i love that example
00:47:46.460
of turnaround times on everest if i am not at the summit at 1 p.m i must turn around right it's like
00:47:55.340
the perfect example of a state and a date that you can then apply as your friend did to a wide variety
00:48:02.220
of types of decisions okay so establish kill criteria and if you want to up that bring in
00:48:07.640
someone else a third party who is not so tied up into the decision right because they'll avoid all the
00:48:12.780
they don't have their identity wrapped up in your decision they don't have there's no endowment effect
00:48:16.800
going on to hold you to that well andy this has been a great conversation where can people go to
00:48:21.260
learn more about the book and your work well first of all i just want to i want to tell you how grateful
00:48:26.020
i am to you because when thinking of bets came out you know nobody knew me as an author in this space i
00:48:32.420
don't think people even knew that i had a background in cognitive science and i was just really
00:48:36.380
appreciative that you took a chance on having me on your podcast way back then and so i just want to
00:48:41.820
tell you um how grateful i am for that because you were a really big part of the success of that
00:48:47.700
book and the continued success of that book and so i'm also very appreciative of you having me on to
00:48:52.240
come talk about my latest obsession which is quitting so but anyway i so i just want to i just want to
00:48:57.000
express my gratitude there it's my pleasure in terms of finding out about me you know you can
00:49:03.340
obviously follow me on twitter i am the one who's actually running my twitter account so that's where
00:49:08.800
you're going to get the most authentic version of annie duke but you can also just go to my website
00:49:13.580
annieduke.com you can contact me there i do try to respond to people who contact me i'm not always
00:49:20.840
perfect at it it depends a little bit on how busy i am but i try you can also uh you know see like
00:49:27.180
speeches and and writing that i've done and sort of find out what the latest media is there there's a
00:49:32.380
newsletter there that you can subscribe to which i think that i hope that people enjoy and obviously
00:49:38.420
you can find out about where to buy my books there as well so that's really kind of the best place to
00:49:42.540
go find me and then the last thing is i would love it if people would check out the alliance for
00:49:47.840
decision education which is a non-profit that i co-founded trying to take a lot of the principles
00:49:52.500
that i talk about and write about you know to an adult audience and bring that into k-12 education
00:49:58.340
to start to think about you know in the world that we live in now shouldn't we be teaching kids
00:50:05.500
starting very very early about how to make decisions you know how to process information
00:50:12.340
and understand what is true how to figure out what to do once you find out what's true you know what is
00:50:18.520
a habit how do you think about your habits how might you change your habits and i i think that we
00:50:23.780
spend a lot of time teaching kids trigonometry and not enough time teaching kids how to make good
00:50:29.300
decisions and that's what we're trying to do is bring decision education into k-12 well annie duke
00:50:34.440
thanks for your time it's been a pleasure well thank you so much i really appreciate it my guest today
00:50:40.080
was annie duke she's the author of the book quit it's available on amazon.com and bookstores
00:50:43.880
everywhere you find more information about her work at our website annieduke.com also check out
00:50:48.200
our show notes at aom.is slash quit we find links to resources we delve deeper into this topic
00:50:52.640
well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at
00:51:03.660
art of manliness.com where you find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles written
00:51:07.180
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next time's brett mckay remind you i'll listen to the aom podcast but put what you've heard into action