Earlier this week, I wrote about how quitting fits within a moralized framework we’ve inherited from early modern history. It provides a bit of context for the bits below and you can check it out here.
If you read part one of this essay…
…you’ve got some sense that our notions of quitting and persistence may require revising.
Perhaps you already suspect something wrong with our inherited conception of quitting as an indication of some missing inner quality. And former professional poker player Annie Duke would say you’re onto something.
In her 2022 book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Duke argues that our overly moralistic understanding of quitting makes us less successful. Grit is useful, but only when modulated with circumspection and flexibility.
From a poker player’s perspective, moralizing the act of quitting makes little sense:
A hand of poker, like life more generally, contain many unknowns. If a poker player insists on playing every hand to the end, they’ll be very bad at poker.
The best players, those who win tournaments and huge cash prizes, understand that they should fold almost all of their hands. They’re acutely sensitive to the conditions they need to succeed and don’t browbeat themselves when those circumstances refuse to manifest.
Duke advocates bringing more quitting into our lives. Grit and persistence is important in persisting through achievable challenges. But so is knowing when to fold your cards and try other things.
Quitting is a decision-making tool.
Duke’s big insight is that life is stochastic.
This means that while we can make informed assumptions about the future based on past experience, we can’t predict exactly what will happen. In other words, we can’t determine how a particular goal or project will turn out until we get started.
“Quit and grit are two sides of the exact same decision. Decision-making in the real world requires action without complete information. Quitting is the tool that allows us to react to new information that is revealed after we make a decision.”1
We’ll never have all the facts at a project’s outset. Unforeseen expenses or obstacles almost always arise. And once we take a course of action, new info reveals itself.
Duke argues this is critical feedback, useful for adjusting our approach or quitting altogether. Let’s consider an example from distance running:
Perhaps you set a goal to run a personal best in a half-marathon. But as you train, work gets a bit intense, or a child becomes ill, or training just happens to be harder than expected.
You didn’t know any of this when you set out. So unless persisting miserably to the finish is valuable to you (and it might be!), there’s no shame in adjusting your goals or deciding not to race the half-marathon at all.
This is an important insight because as humans, we’re psychologically vulnerable to the sunk-cost fallacy, the flawed logic of refusing to abandon a failing or flawed course of action simply because we’re already invested.
We think because we’ve committed resources, we must keep investing to to recoup the loss. Otherwise we’ve “wasted” time and treasure. Rationally, Duke points out, this is just loss following loss.
We’re more susceptible to this when we overly moralize or politicize persistence. Or if we wrap our identity too tightly around an endeavor. We risk becoming spiritually invested in losing ventures like crappy jobs, bad marathons, or Mike Pence’s presidential campaign.
This requires self-reflection and analysis about an endeavor and facing tough truths regarding what would need to happen to reach success. Then we need the courage to walk away and avoid sinking more time and resources into a failed bet.
Life’s too short.
For me, the most compelling reason Duke gives for quitting is our limited time on this earth. Quitting clears our plate from unsuccessful or unfulfilling ventures. That frees us up to try different approaches to achieve our goals. Quitting makes us more flexible, iterative, and fast-moving.
“By not quitting, you are missing out on the opportunity to switch to something that will create more progress toward your goals. Anytime you stay mired in a losing endeavor, that is when you are slowing your progress. Anytime you stick to something when there are better opportunities out there, that is when you are slowing your progress.”2
Duke illustrates this with an example from running: imagine a runner who grits through an injury to finish a race, however long it takes them.
Here the Protestant Ethic remains strong in our culture. When we learn that someone limped the last ten miles of a marathon on a broken leg, many of us marvel, “Wow, how impressive to persist through such pain.” Consider how our media reacts:
But a poker player like Duke finds this irrational, indeed nihilistic. Running on a bad injury means you will almost certainly miss your goals for that race. Even worse, you risk your performance for future races by exacerbating the injury.
But even if you’re not facing broken bones or injury, we should be clear eyed about persistence and quitting. I experienced this recently.
Last November, I dropped out of an ultramarathon called the Quad Dipsea— four passes back and forth on the Dipsea Trail, a challenging path north of San Francisco that connects the town of Mill Valley with the Pacific Ocean.
Fast running is difficult on Dipsea. The 7.5 mile course features several flights of stairs, strenuous climbs, and a few dangerously steep descents. But it’s the kind of running I generally enjoy: a grinding, hilly course with a few sustained climbs.
Alas, t‘was not to be.
At the start, I found myself midpack and drifting backwards. My prep was weak and in hindsight, I wasn’t race ready after finishing my first 50-mile race a few months earlier.
I didn’t feel horrible. Just not great. My race wasn’t going disastrously. Just not particularly well. I was not, I concluded as I jogged stiffly back into Mill Valley, enjoying myself. Based on my sensory feedback, it was doubtful that things would get better.
So I dropped out at the halfway point, walked over to a diner, and had a nice omelette.
Did quitting sting? You fucking bet. But it let me refocus on other goals. Had I finished the race, I’d have needed at least a month to rest and build back up. Instead, I bounced back a couple days later.
By the next month, I had another target race in mind: the Frogs-to-Grapes challenge, which I ran in early March. Completing that was much more meaningful to me than limping home in the Quad Dipsea. Quitting opened up new possibilities.
It’s a DNF I won’t lose any sleep over.
Thanks for reading.
Weekly run
Breakfast Club meets every Thursday for an 8-mile run:
When and Where: 6:30am at Lake Temescal in Oakland, CA
Pace: ~7:00 to 7:40 pace with a few hundred feet of climbing
Other tidbits from Annie Duke:
Determine your “kill criteria.” Before you start, figure out under what conditions you’ll quit the venture. For example, you might determine that if after 2 years, you’ve not been promoted, you’ll find another job.
Define what success looks like. If you know exactly what accomplishing your objective looks like, it’s easier to determine when you need to stop and reassess.
Avoid escalation of commitment. The worst thing one can do with a losing proposition is think pouring additional resources without other changes will change the outcome. Be vigilant against the sunk cost fallacy.
Do the hardest thing first. You’re less likely to be vulnerable to sunk-cost thinking if you try to accomplish the most difficult parts of a project first. Are long runs difficult for you, but vital for your qualifying for the Boston Marathon? Better make sure you can actually commit to some long hours on the tarmac before spending two years trying to get to Hopkinton.
Add an “unless”. Creating flexibility in your goals makes us more flexible to the changing landscape around our goal: “I’m going to finish this marathon, unless I get badly injured during the race.” “I’ll run a fifty-mile race, unless I fail to finish 3 benchmark long runs in the build up.”
Tweets of the week
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading.
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Annie Duke, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (New York: Penguin, 2022), 22.
Duke, Quit, 32.
I'm so pleased that not only did you decide to quit the ultra-marathon, but that you also made the wonderfully upbeat decision to treat yourself to breakfast at a diner, post-decision. Bravo for both making the choice and then not wallowing in it!
I recently needed to quit a race and get a DNS because of not training enough. I had signed up for the race and kept thinking I had enough time to train as the weeks went by I just was not ready. Up until the night before the race in my mind I thought I should run it, not wanting to quit. I’m glad I didn’t run the race and end up hurting myself or even end up hating running because of a bad experience.
Thanks for the reminder to set aside the ego when needed.