Quit by Annie Duke

The power of knowing when to walk away

The Book in Three Sentences

What makes is hard to quit is that when we quit, we fear two things: that we have failed, and that we have wasted our time, effort, or money. Quitting should be celebrated, and it is a skill you can develop to enrich your life, encouraging you to value optionality, execute better on the things you stick with, and continue exploring so you can flexibly change with (or in advance of) a changing world. Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early.

---

‘Quit’ Summary

This is my book summary of Quit by Annie Duke. My notes contain best quotes from the book and the key lessons in my view.

Why You Should Quit

• Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies picking the right things to stick to and quitting the rest.

• When the world tells you to quit, it is, of course, possible that you might see something the world doesn’t see, causing you to rightly persist even when others would abandon the cause. But when the world is screaming at the top of its lungs to quit and you refuse to listen, grit can become folly.

• Quitting is the tool that allows you to make different decisions when you learn new information. It gives you the ability to react to the way the world has changed, your state of knowledge has changed, or how you have changed. Having the option to quit will keep you from being paralyzed by uncertainty or being stuck forever in every decision you make.

• Quitting is a decision made under uncertainty. The only time you can be sure you should quit is when it’s no longer a decision, when you’re at the edge of an abyss or you have already stumbled into it.

• Quitting decisions are expected value decisions. To decide whether you need to quit or not, you need to guess the probability in which things will go your way or against you in the long run if you quit or stick.

• Our intuition is that quitting slows down our progress. The reverse is actually true. If you walk away from something that is no longer worthwhile, that frees you to switch to something that is more likely to help you achieve your goals - and you’ll get there faster.

Mental Barriers to Quitting

• Loss aversion causes us to favor options that have the lowest possible loss, even when there are better options available.

• When we are in the gains, we tend to quit too early to avoid the risk of losing what we have earned. Even if the logical decision is to stick.

• When we are in the losses, we want to keep going hoping we can avoid losing if we keep playing. We quit too late and end up in a worse position.

• When we are in the losses, we are not only more likely to stick to a losing course of action, but we will escalate our commitment towards the losing cause, and further strengthen our belief that we are on the right path.

• The sunk cost effect is a cognitive illusion where people take into account resources they have previously invested into an endeavor when making decisions about whether to continue and spend more. It causes people to stick in situations where they should be quitting.

• We fear being wasteful. We need to start thinking about waste as a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one. The real waste lies in spending more money or time in something that is no longer worthwhile.

• The endowment effect is a cognitive bias where we value something we own more than we would if we didn’t own it. Ownership of objects, ideas and beliefs interfere with our ability to walk away.

• The status quo is a cognitive bias where we have a preference to stick with those decisions, methods, and paths we’re already on. We therefore, resist moving from them to something new or different. When you say, “I’m just not ready to decide yet,” what you are saying is, “For now I’m choosing the status quo.”

• When your identity is what you do, then what you do becomes hard to abandon, because it means quitting who you are. We want others to view us as consistent.

• Overly optimism makes you less likely to walk away while not actually increasing your chances of success.

How to Quit

• Quit while you are ahead, when the path you’re on is on a losing proposition. But keep going when you have a positive expected value.

• Use the monkeys and pedestals mental model: Imagine you’re trying to train a monkey to juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal in a public park. If you can achieve this, you’ve got a money making act. There are two tasks you need to accomplish: training the monkey (the hard task) and building the pedestal (the easy task).

• Pedestals are part of the problem that you know you can already solve, like designing a business card. The hardest thing is training the monkey.

• When faced with a complex, ambitious goal, (a) identify the hardest thing first; (b) try to solve for that as quickly as possible; and (c) beware of false progress

• The monkey and pedestal model will help you quit sooner. If you can’t train the monkey, you’re better off quitting.

• When you enter into a course of action, create a set of kill criteria. This is a list of signals you might see in future that would tell you to quit. A simple way to create a kill criteria is with “states” and “dates”: “If by (date), I have/haven’t reached a particular (state), I’ll quit.

• Get a quitting coach. When someone is outside looking in, they can often see the situation better than you can. The best quitting coach is someone who loves you enough to look out for your long-term well-being. They are willing to tell you the hard truth even if it means hurting your feelings in the short-term.

• When we find something that’s working for us, whether it’s a job, a career, a product we’re developing, a business strategy, or even a favorite restaurant, continuing to explore what other options might be available is a good strategy in our uncertain world. Have backup plans.

• We need to figure out our exploit-explore balance. Exploiting refers to taking advantage of our current opportunities. Explore refers to taking time to explore new opportunities. Exploit your current situation but also keep your eyes open for new opportunities.

• Understand that goals are a proxy for your desires and not an end in themselves. Goals can make it possible to achieve worthwhile things, but they can also increase the chances that we will escalate commitment when we should quit.

• Goals have a dark side: they have a pass-fail nature that disregards progress, they are often inflexible and pursuing them leads to ignoring other opportunities that might be available.

• Creating more flexible goals with a kill criteria is the best way to avoid the dark side of goals. Every goal should have at least one unless that helps us abandon losing causes. “I will keep doing X unless Y happens”

• Inflexible goals aren’t good for a flexible world.

Big Question: What do you need to quit today, this week, this month, this year?

Thanks for reading. I encourage you to get the book from your nearest bookshop and enjoy great stories of people who quit and who refused to quit.

You can find Annie Duke on her Substack publication; Thinking in Bets.