What Makes Quitting such a Hard Decision

00:00:00.000 | (upbeat music)

00:00:02.580 | - Curious what made quitting such a hard decision?

00:00:08.820 | What characterized it so differently

00:00:10.640 | that it was worth the kind of followup to dig into?

00:00:13.640 | - Basically, here's the deal.

00:00:17.180 | What allows us to make decisions under uncertainty

00:00:21.600 | is that we have the option to quit.

00:00:23.720 | Okay, so just basic, right?

00:00:26.160 | Imagine if when you hired someone

00:00:29.480 | you could never fire them.

00:00:30.960 | How hard of a decision that would be.

00:00:34.520 | Imagine if as soon as you went on a date with somebody

00:00:38.880 | you had to marry them.

00:00:40.280 | How hard would it be to choose somebody

00:00:43.000 | to go on a date with, right?

00:00:45.320 | Imagine if you rented an apartment,

00:00:47.680 | you couldn't get out of the lease, like ever.

00:00:51.080 | Like these things would become very difficult, right?

00:00:54.080 | So decision-making under uncertainty is really hard,

00:00:57.320 | but what allows us to be able to do it,

00:00:59.320 | to be able to choose things when we know so little

00:01:02.240 | is that when we find out new stuff,

00:01:05.400 | whether it's about the world

00:01:07.000 | or it's about our own preferences,

00:01:09.200 | oh, it turns out I don't like this neighborhood,

00:01:11.220 | whatever, that we can quit.

00:01:13.820 | Okay, so it's a really, really, really important decision.

00:01:16.800 | It's having this option to quit is incredibly valuable.

00:01:20.560 | But what's interesting is that what the science tells us

00:01:24.120 | is that we're really bad at it.

00:01:26.800 | So, you know, there's a lot,

00:01:28.720 | obviously grit is a really, really popular concept.

00:01:32.000 | People think about grit as character building,

00:01:35.880 | in fact, as almost synonymous with character.

00:01:39.640 | And it's true that grit's really important

00:01:42.280 | for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile.

00:01:44.600 | That's incredibly important, right?

00:01:46.500 | We have to not quit things just 'cause they're hard.

00:01:49.360 | Otherwise we won't ever be successful at anything

00:01:51.560 | 'cause anything worth doing

00:01:52.560 | is gonna be hard at some point, okay?

00:01:55.540 | So that's for sure true.

00:01:57.440 | And I think everybody should read "Grit"

00:01:59.280 | and it's a great book and Angela Duckworth is brilliant.

00:02:02.540 | But I was missing the other side of the conversation,

00:02:06.180 | which is that grit also gets you to stick to hard things

00:02:08.880 | that are not worthwhile.

00:02:10.220 | And that's a really huge problem.

00:02:13.480 | Grit, we can't think about grit as a virtue

00:02:15.800 | and quitting as a vice or a character flaw, right?

00:02:18.680 | Because there's, I can show you lots of circumstances

00:02:21.140 | where grit is a character flaw.

00:02:24.420 | Where sticking to something too long is bad.

00:02:27.320 | Like Muhammad Ali boxing for years

00:02:29.640 | after he already had symptoms of Parkinson.

00:02:34.320 | You know, when he was really suffering physically,

00:02:36.880 | he should have walked away from the game.

00:02:39.720 | So we know that it's very context dependent, right?

00:02:44.720 | And sometimes quitting is the best thing

00:02:47.040 | that you can ever do.

00:02:48.520 | Like if you're in a job with a toxic boss

00:02:51.200 | or you're in a toxic relationship

00:02:53.360 | or you're at the top of Everest

00:02:55.320 | and it's past the turnaround time

00:02:56.840 | and there's a snowstorm coming in.

00:02:58.720 | Clearly sticking to it is dumb in that situation, right?

00:03:02.160 | So we need to realize that they're the same decision

00:03:04.880 | and one is not good and one is not bad.

00:03:07.880 | It's very dependent on context.

00:03:09.880 | And then when you start to look and dive

00:03:11.800 | into the scientific literature,

00:03:14.520 | it turns out that there's just tremendous,

00:03:18.400 | just a tremendous cognitive forces

00:03:21.200 | that make it very hard for us to walk away from things.

00:03:24.780 | Not at the right time anyway.

00:03:26.740 | All the way from sunk costs,

00:03:27.960 | which we've talked about a little,

00:03:29.160 | which is this tendency to stick to things

00:03:31.180 | because you're worried you'll have wasted the time

00:03:33.600 | or the money or whatever that you put into it

00:03:35.840 | because you wanna get that back.

00:03:38.400 | Somehow like when you hold onto a stock

00:03:40.360 | or you stay in a job or whatever,

00:03:42.760 | there's issues that have to do

00:03:43.880 | with endowment ownership over things.

00:03:45.760 | We value the things that we own

00:03:48.160 | more than the things that we don't,

00:03:50.280 | including our beliefs, by the way.

00:03:53.040 | And we don't like to let go of those things

00:03:55.600 | that have to do with something called sure loss aversion,

00:03:59.360 | which Daniel Kahneman talks about,

00:04:00.960 | which is, as we just said,

00:04:02.680 | like you have a loss on the books.

00:04:04.560 | If you quit, it turns it,

00:04:05.880 | I'm sorry, you have a loss on paper rather.

00:04:08.400 | If you quit, it turns into a realized loss.

00:04:12.600 | We don't like that.

00:04:14.120 | That doesn't feel good to us.

00:04:16.160 | So, as Richard Thaler says,

00:04:19.160 | like we don't like to close mental accounts in the losses.

00:04:22.880 | So like, we don't like to close those accounts

00:04:24.960 | and sort of eat that loss.

00:04:26.680 | Even though, obviously just like a stock portfolio,

00:04:31.680 | our decisions are a portfolio,

00:04:35.280 | our opportunities are a portfolio,

00:04:37.480 | and we ought to be trying to spend our time

00:04:39.200 | on the ones that are going to move us toward our goals

00:04:41.840 | the most that are gonna cause us to gain the most ground.

00:04:45.440 | We open an account for a particular thing we're doing,

00:04:49.280 | whether it's a marathon or climbing Everest

00:04:51.360 | or a job or relationship or whatever.

00:04:53.800 | And we don't think about that time, that effort,

00:04:57.480 | that all of that is fungible

00:04:58.760 | across all the possible opportunities we have.

00:05:01.560 | Instead, we just think if I quit now,

00:05:03.280 | I won't have hit my goal.

00:05:04.600 | And then I'm gonna be a failure and I'm gonna have lost.

00:05:08.040 | And so we won't quit.

00:05:09.440 | There's identity, cognitive dissonance, status quo bias.

00:05:13.480 | These are all in the book, omission, commission bias.

00:05:17.000 | It's like, there's so much stuff

00:05:19.680 | that we just carry around with us,

00:05:21.480 | this cognitive debris that makes it really hard

00:05:23.800 | for us to walk away.

00:05:25.520 | And here's the thing that why I'm so passionate

00:05:28.240 | about this topic is that we think

00:05:31.520 | that quitting will slow our progress down.

00:05:33.680 | We think it may actually cause us to lose ground,

00:05:39.220 | but that's not true.

00:05:42.280 | When you quit at the right time,

00:05:44.400 | it actually gets you to where you want to go faster

00:05:47.920 | because it stops you from sticking to something

00:05:49.840 | that isn't actually causing you to get there,

00:05:53.080 | to gain ground toward your goal

00:05:55.360 | and allows you to switch to something

00:05:57.840 | that will allow you to gain ground toward your goal.

00:06:01.480 | And that's the thing that we miss

00:06:03.480 | because we don't see the other opportunities

00:06:05.680 | that the thing we're doing is stopping us from engaging in

00:06:10.960 | because there's a cost to that time.

00:06:12.760 | There's a cost to that money that we're spending

00:06:14.520 | on whatever it is that we're into

00:06:17.560 | or that we're pursuing, the path that we're on.

00:06:20.760 | And we won't let go of it

00:06:22.560 | because if we haven't reached our goal,

00:06:24.040 | we think we're a failure.

00:06:25.320 | But just like if you sell that stock at 30

00:06:28.880 | and you take the $20, you know, whatever,

00:06:30.920 | you lost the $20, so what?

00:06:32.960 | You can put that $30 into other investments

00:06:35.200 | that are actually gonna get you

00:06:36.360 | to financial wellbeing more quickly.

00:06:39.680 | So holding on to a stock that isn't worthwhile

00:06:42.880 | because you already lost $20 in it

00:06:45.440 | is actually slowing your progress down

00:06:47.680 | because you can't go put those resources

00:06:49.360 | into something that will get you

00:06:50.400 | to financial wellbeing more quickly.

00:06:52.320 | And that's true whether it's a stock or a job

00:06:54.360 | or a relationship or a race you're running.

00:06:56.600 | I don't really care.

00:06:58.520 | If the world tells you you should quit, you ought to do that

00:07:01.360 | because that's the thing that allows us

00:07:03.960 | to decide under uncertainty in the first place.

00:07:05.920 | So let's start exercising that option

00:07:08.520 | so that we can more efficiently and more quickly

00:07:10.860 | get to where we wanna go.

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