Grit vs. Quit

I recently came across this great IdeaCast from Harvard Business Review about how quitting is often the best option. Allison Beard interviewed Annie Duke, who wrote the book Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. It has some great insights that could benefit each of us!

Popular Culture

LADY GAGA: It’s not about winning, but what it’s about is not giving up.

LEBRON JAMES: You have to work the hardest. You have to chase what seems impossible over and over, and over again because giving up is not an option.

SERENA WILLIAMS: Just never give up because you never know what can happen. You never know who you can inspire.

ROCKY BALBOA: Nobody is going to hit as hard as life, but it ain’t about how hard you hit, it’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.

STEVE CARELL: I will never stop trying because when you find the one, you never give up.

BARACK OBAMA: You might want to give up. Don’t give up.

Whether it’s in sports, movies, politics, or business, we spend a lot of time celebrating people who persevere. We prize stick-to-itiveness, grit and persistence. We applaud winners and especially underdogs who beat the odds. But our guest today wants us to rethink those assumptions. If you don’t succeed, not just at first but over and over, is it really best to try, try, try, try again? Long-term, do winners never quit and quitters never win? Or should we be thinking  in less all or nothing terms about our businesses and careers?

Why is quitting so stigmatized?

Annie Duke gives us another perspective. She says: “Oh my gosh. We have so many cognitive biases that really stop us from stopping things. Our aversion to quitting is really built pretty deeply into our mindware. And then you see this reflected in even the English language.

So when you look at the synonyms for grit or grittiness, you have metal or pluck. It’s a sign of character. Those who stick it out are the heroes of our stories. Whereas when you look up synonyms for quitter, it’s like loser, basically, coward. They’re not the heroes of the story, they’re the villains. I think that that is very much a reflection in the way that languages frame the way our minds think about quitting.”

Bias Often Keeps Us From Quitting

“I can tell you is that bias is like the sunk cost fallacy, for example, that cause us to take into account what we’ve already spent in deciding whether to spend more on an endeavor or continue loss aversion, the endowment effect, the sort of price we put on ownership, how much we overvalue things we own versus identical things that we don’t own. Even issues of identity, these really cut across all cultures. These are very well replicated findings over about half a decade of scientific research. So I think that this is really in large part, part of the human condition.

So in a job setting you’ll see people not shut down projects, not abandon a product they’re developing or even not leave their job because they’ll say, “Well, then I’ll have wasted my time or my money if I quit.” So we don’t want to leave a job because we say, “I’ve put so much time into it. I’ve spent all these years in school and training and learning the culture. And if I quit, I’ll have wasted all of that time. I don’t want to shut this project down because what about all the money that we’ve already spent on it? If I quit, there’s no way that I can get that back.”

Now, that’s a fallacy because it’s already spent. What really matters is whether the next minute or the next dollar or the next bit of effort that you put into that project is worthwhile. So I would say that’s a very strong force that stops us from quitting.

But interestingly on the other side of things, I would say that loss aversion also really stops us from quitting. So it’s a little bit weird because loss aversion has to do with a problem with starting things in the sense that we focus on the potential losses that are associated with the decision that we might make, not thinking about what the expected value is or what the overall return on investment is.

You might ask, “Well, what does that have to do with quitting?” Well, when you’re quitting something, you’re not just quitting, you’re going to start something new. And so if we have an aversion to starting things where we imagine the ways in which they might not work out, this will actually stop us from starting new things, which in turn stops us from quitting.

So a simple example of that is you’ll hear people when they’re in a job that they hate, say things like, “Well, I don’t want to quit because what if I take a new job and I hate that one and it’s not good?”

That's really the loss aversion speaking, right? It’s like, “Well, I know I’m going to be miserable in this job, but if I start something new, what if I’m miserable in that as well?” Never mind the fact that you have a much higher probability of being happy in the new endeavor than the one that you’re sticking to. And just for people who are thinking, “Well, don’t you have loss aversion for the things that you’re already doing?” The answer is not as much. It’s asymmetric. Because the status quo, whatever it is that we’re sticking to, we don’t think about that as starting something new every day. Even though in reality it is.

So in some sense, every day that you do it, you’re starting anew, but we just don’t process it that way. So where loss aversion really gets recruited is in the thought about quitting something to start something new.

So you can see where these two biases work together in a really malign way, which is, I don’t want to stop something for fear. I’ve wasted everything I already put into it and I don’t want to start something new because I’m worried that maybe that won’t work out.

One of the biggest things that I see is opportunity cost neglect. We don’t tend to take into account the gains that might be associated with another course of action in comparison to the thing that we’re already doing. So if you have resources that are pursuing a particular project, those are resources that can’t pursue other projects.

And any other project that you might pursue has losses and gains associated with it. We’re almost myopic in the sense that we really can’t even see the other opportunities that are available to us and that causes us to neglect the gains that might be associated with those other opportunities.

One of the places that I see this really strongly separate and apart from things like strategic initiatives is in employment decisions. So people will have underperformers in a job. What I see is, again, people really focusing on, “Well, what if I fire them and I don’t hire someone who’s good into that new role?” What they neglect is the gains.

One of the things that I try to do with them is I say, “Well, imagine that you did let this person go and there was nobody in the role? Would it be better or worse?”

We work through things like, “Well, they’re having a really negative impact on the team, so if they weren’t there, I think that the culture of the team would be healthier.” Generally the answer is it would actually be better not to have anybody in the role.

And then we really try to focus on what’s the probability that somebody new will be better than the person that you currently have, to try to get them to stop focusing on the possibility of loss and start focusing on the gains that might be associated with other options. And this generally helps to get them to those decisions more quickly, whether it’s about employment or deciding to stop pursuing a sales lead or shutting down a strategic initiative.

I think that we have the intuition that once we know about these types of biases that we won’t do them. So if I explain really clearly the sunk cost policy to you and I say, “Look, if you buy a stock at 50 and it’s trading at 40, you’re more likely to hold that stock than in comparison to whether you would buy that stock at 40.”

So in other words, if you wouldn’t buy the stock at 40, you shouldn’t hold it just because you happen to buy it at 50. So now I’ve told you that and I’m sure, Alison, that you have the intuition. Well, okay, so now I know that so I won’t do it anymore.

So there’s a broad umbrella term that all of these forces both cognitive and motivational go under when it comes to failure to quit, and it’s called escalation of commitment. Escalation of commitment is just a broad phenomenon that we have the intuition that once we start something, when we discover information that would tell us that things aren’t going well. We’ll actually stop doing what we’re doing. What a variety of researchers have shown is very specifically Barry Staw and someone named Jeffrey Rubin who are really kind of the pioneers in this field, is that it’s perversely opposite in the sense that we’ll actually escalate our commitment to the losing cause. So we see the negative signals and we just invest more.

Jeffrey Rubin was one of the pioneers, as I said, and he was very much an expert on these entrapment problems, these escalation of commitment problems. Jeffrey Rubin was also a very avid mountain climber. He had set a goal for himself to climb the hundred peaks. He was climbing his hundredth peak with a graduate student and a really heavy fog rolled in. His graduate student said, “Hey, I really don’t think that we should continue up. It’s pretty foggy here.”

And he said, “No, it’s fine. I’m going to keep going.” The graduate student turned around and Jeffrey Rubin’s body was found two days later. So for anyone who thinks knowing is the same as doing, he really understood these problems with being entrapped in losing causes, the way that we ignore the signals that we ought to turn around. And yet he kept going and he perished.

Succeed Fast or Quit Fast; Monkeys and Pedestals 

I just want to say I hate the term fail fast because it makes it seem like stopping something is a failure. And I think that stopping something that isn’t worthwhile is a success. I want people to start saying, “Succeed fast or quit fast.” I think this obsession with failure, I’m not sure that it’s helpful because it keeps tying quitting to failure. And quitting is not a failure.

But there’s another way that you can approach the prioritization of projects, which is to make sure that the path you’re on is the right path to pursue because you’ve actually solved the hard part of the problem. So let me try to explain using a mental model. And this mental model comes from Astro Teller who is the CEO, otherwise known as Captain of Moonshots over at X, which is Google’s innovation hub. So obviously, they’re doing things that are highly uncertain when they choose to start a project, mostly things are going to not work out, but if it does work out, it’s going to create this amazing change for the world.

And the way that Astro Teller approaches everything is that he wants to get to that answer really quickly of whether the thing that they’re pursuing is worth continuing with. So he offers up this mental model, which I think is wonderful, called Monkeys and Pedestals, and here’s how it goes.

So imagine that you’ve decided that you’re going to create an act. And the act is that you’re going to train a monkey to juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal. Now, obviously people are going to give you tons of money for that. Yay.

So if you’re going to approach that project, there’s kind of two pieces to the project. One is training the monkey to juggle the flaming torches and the other is building the pedestal. So my question for you is, which should you attack first?

You should train the monkey first. Now, what’s interesting though is that in normal project planning, people would build the pedestal first. And the reason for that is that the pedestal is also known as low hanging fruit. I’m sure that you’ve been in project meetings where people are like, “Well, what should we do? Well, what’s the low hanging fruit? Let’s do that first.” Well, the problem with building pedestals first is that you already know you can do it.

If you build the pedestal first, it’s the illusion of progress. You’re not actually making any progress because you already know you can do it. The bottleneck, the hard part of the problem is if you can train that monkey to juggle the flaming torches, that’s the thing that you don’t know.

So what Astro Teller’s mental model tells us is that we need to attack the hard part of the problem first. In other words, when we’re thinking about pursuing something, we need to say, “What are the unknowns? What are the bottlenecks to success? And let’s not do anything until we figure out if we can solve for that.”

So actually here’s a really good example of the power of Monkeys and Pedestals in terms of prioritization. So at some point in X’s history, they were pitched the hyperloop, essentially a vacuum tube that will take a train from coast to coast in the United States in two hours. So it’s a super high speed rail. So in this particular case, the technology itself wasn’t a monkey because that had already been proven. You could move things through these tubes just fine. But they did identify two monkeys that they didn’t know if they could solve for. The first had to do with regulatory problems, which was that you’re going to have to move this system through many, many different townships. Each of them are going to have different regulations. And that seemed like a very tough problem to solve.

And separate and apart from that, really to know whether this thing is going to work, you have to know given the speeds that this is going to run at, that you can stop the train safely without killing people on board. So that’s a pretty big monkey, right?

And so as they discussed it, they realize that in order to get the train all the way up to speed, that you’ll basically have to build almost the whole thing before you could figure out if you could stop it safely, which is tons and tons and tons of money before we can figure out whether we can actually stop the thing safely.

So they’ve rejected the idea, how long did it take them to reject it using monkeys and pedestals? It took them 15 minutes. Now, let’s compare that to Virgin who did decide to pursue the hyperloop. They’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars for this. And there was just an article in the New York Times, maybe a month or so ago where they said, “Oh, the hyperloop is in trouble.” We can’t figure out if we’re going to be able to build this all the way across country, given the fact that every single township has different rules.

But then the other thing was that they had only ever built enough of the system to get the train up to one sixth of the speed that it would eventually reach. They had never been able to accomplish a real safety test, at which point they did not abandon ship. Instead, they’re pivoting, let’s say to instead of wanting to bring people across country, they want to bring cargo across country, which is a problem that we don’t really have.

We need to understand grit is great. Sometimes you see something that other people don’t see, but sometimes when the world is yelling at you to stop and you ignore them, that’s no longer a virtue. Then it’s folly.

We all have biases when it comes to gritting or quitting. Being aware of those can help us to make the best decisions that we can in a given situation. Bring this topic up in your next session at Posture Massage and let’s chat about it!