(upbeat music) - Curious what made quitting such a hard decision? What characterized it so differently that it was worth the kind of followup to dig into? - Basically, here's the deal. What allows us to make decisions under uncertainty is that we have the option to quit. Okay, so just basic, right?

Imagine if when you hired someone you could never fire them. How hard of a decision that would be. Imagine if as soon as you went on a date with somebody you had to marry them. How hard would it be to choose somebody to go on a date with, right?

Imagine if you rented an apartment, you couldn't get out of the lease, like ever. Like these things would become very difficult, right? So decision-making under uncertainty is really hard, but what allows us to be able to do it, to be able to choose things when we know so little is that when we find out new stuff, whether it's about the world or it's about our own preferences, oh, it turns out I don't like this neighborhood, whatever, that we can quit.

Okay, so it's a really, really, really important decision. It's having this option to quit is incredibly valuable. But what's interesting is that what the science tells us is that we're really bad at it. So, you know, there's a lot, obviously grit is a really, really popular concept. People think about grit as character building, in fact, as almost synonymous with character.

And it's true that grit's really important for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile. That's incredibly important, right? We have to not quit things just 'cause they're hard. Otherwise we won't ever be successful at anything 'cause anything worth doing is gonna be hard at some point, okay?

So that's for sure true. And I think everybody should read "Grit" and it's a great book and Angela Duckworth is brilliant. But I was missing the other side of the conversation, which is that grit also gets you to stick to hard things that are not worthwhile. And that's a really huge problem.

Grit, we can't think about grit as a virtue and quitting as a vice or a character flaw, right? Because there's, I can show you lots of circumstances where grit is a character flaw. Where sticking to something too long is bad. Like Muhammad Ali boxing for years after he already had symptoms of Parkinson.

You know, when he was really suffering physically, he should have walked away from the game. So we know that it's very context dependent, right? And sometimes quitting is the best thing that you can ever do. Like if you're in a job with a toxic boss or you're in a toxic relationship or you're at the top of Everest and it's past the turnaround time and there's a snowstorm coming in.

Clearly sticking to it is dumb in that situation, right? So we need to realize that they're the same decision and one is not good and one is not bad. It's very dependent on context. And then when you start to look and dive into the scientific literature, it turns out that there's just tremendous, just a tremendous cognitive forces that make it very hard for us to walk away from things.

Not at the right time anyway. All the way from sunk costs, which we've talked about a little, which is this tendency to stick to things because you're worried you'll have wasted the time or the money or whatever that you put into it because you wanna get that back. Somehow like when you hold onto a stock or you stay in a job or whatever, there's issues that have to do with endowment ownership over things.

We value the things that we own more than the things that we don't, including our beliefs, by the way. And we don't like to let go of those things that have to do with something called sure loss aversion, which Daniel Kahneman talks about, which is, as we just said, like you have a loss on the books.

If you quit, it turns it, I'm sorry, you have a loss on paper rather. If you quit, it turns into a realized loss. We don't like that. That doesn't feel good to us. So, as Richard Thaler says, like we don't like to close mental accounts in the losses. So like, we don't like to close those accounts and sort of eat that loss.

Even though, obviously just like a stock portfolio, our decisions are a portfolio, our opportunities are a portfolio, and we ought to be trying to spend our time on the ones that are going to move us toward our goals the most that are gonna cause us to gain the most ground.

We open an account for a particular thing we're doing, whether it's a marathon or climbing Everest or a job or relationship or whatever. And we don't think about that time, that effort, that all of that is fungible across all the possible opportunities we have. Instead, we just think if I quit now, I won't have hit my goal.

And then I'm gonna be a failure and I'm gonna have lost. And so we won't quit. There's identity, cognitive dissonance, status quo bias. These are all in the book, omission, commission bias. It's like, there's so much stuff that we just carry around with us, this cognitive debris that makes it really hard for us to walk away.

And here's the thing that why I'm so passionate about this topic is that we think that quitting will slow our progress down. We think it may actually cause us to lose ground, but that's not true. When you quit at the right time, it actually gets you to where you want to go faster because it stops you from sticking to something that isn't actually causing you to get there, to gain ground toward your goal and allows you to switch to something that will allow you to gain ground toward your goal.

And that's the thing that we miss because we don't see the other opportunities that the thing we're doing is stopping us from engaging in because there's a cost to that time. There's a cost to that money that we're spending on whatever it is that we're into or that we're pursuing, the path that we're on.

And we won't let go of it because if we haven't reached our goal, we think we're a failure. But just like if you sell that stock at 30 and you take the $20, you know, whatever, you lost the $20, so what? You can put that $30 into other investments that are actually gonna get you to financial wellbeing more quickly.

So holding on to a stock that isn't worthwhile because you already lost $20 in it is actually slowing your progress down because you can't go put those resources into something that will get you to financial wellbeing more quickly. And that's true whether it's a stock or a job or a relationship or a race you're running.

I don't really care. If the world tells you you should quit, you ought to do that because that's the thing that allows us to decide under uncertainty in the first place. So let's start exercising that option so that we can more efficiently and more quickly get to where we wanna go.