Should you quit?
It's hard to know, isn't it?
Whether it’s a job, a feature idea, a startup you’re trying to build, a relationship—it's just hard to know, isn't it?
Everything we do has opportunity cost—what we gave up to make *this* choice instead of *that* one. And everything in our default wiring—and our cultural narratives around product, startups, hustle culture—pushes us to keep going.
"Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early."
- Annie Duke, in “Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away”
Let that sink in.
Quitting gets a bad rap. "Winners never quit, and quitters never win."
Bullshit.
In fact, the biggest winners are the biggest quitters—they quit all the things that they couldn't win at, so they could channel their energy into the few things that they could really excel at.
This should rhyme with the recent post on strategy. And for good reason: the hard part about strategy is focusing, which, at the heart is about making hard decisions about where to invest and where to cut bait.
Us humans are riddled with cognitive biases which make it *very* hard to be rational about quitting on time, or even close to on time. Here's a handful of them—some you may already be familiar with—that we'll be reviewing in the coming days to improve our decision game:
• decision journals
• quit vs grit
• omission-commission
The point of all this? To help us be *more* rational in making hard calls. Perfect rationality is an unrealistic goal.
But we can get better.