Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.
Annie Duke in Quit
I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).
Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.
Annie Duke in Quit
The monkeys for the hyperloop to be viable were things like whether you could safely load and unload passengers or cargo, and whether you could get the system up to speed and get it to brake without incident. A couple hundred yards of track wouldn’t tell you anything about whether you could conquer those challenges. In fact, Teller and the team at X figured out that you would have to build practically the whole thing before you knew whether it worked. You would have to build a bunch of pedestals before you could find out if the monkeys were intractable. They quickly decided not to pursue it. One of Teller’s valuable insights is that pedestal-building creates the illusion of progress rather than actual progress itself.
Annie Duke in Quit
Teller realizes that when you’re building pedestals, you are also accumulating sunk costs that make it hard to quit even as you find out that you may not be able to train the monkey to juggle those torches. By focusing on the monkey first, you naturally reduce the debris you accumulate solving for something that’s, in reality, already solved.
Annie Duke in Quit
That’s the funny thing about grit. While grit can get you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, grit can also get you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile.
Annie Duke in Quit
Essentially, when you enter into an endeavor, you want to imagine what you could find out that would tell you it’s no longer worth pursuing. Ask yourself, “What are the signs that, if I see them in the future, will cause me to exit the road I’m on? What could I learn about the state of the world or the state of myself that would change my commitment to this decision?” That list offers you a set of kill criteria, literally criteria for killing a project or changing your mind or cutting your losses. It’s one of the best tools for helping you figure out when to quit closer to on time. Kill criteria could consist of information you learn that tells you the monkey isn’t trainable or that you’re not sufficiently likely to reach your goal, or signs that luck has gone against you.
Annie Duke in Quit
The best quitting criteria combine two things: a state and a date. A state is just what it sounds like, an objective, measurable condition you or your project is in, a benchmark that you have hit or missed. A date is the when. Kill criteria, generally, include both states and dates, in the form of “If I am (or am not) in a particular state at a particular date or at a particular time, then I have to quit.” Or “If I haven’t done X by Y (time), I’ll quit.” Or “If I haven’t achieved X by the time I’ve spent Y (amount in money, effort, time, or other resources), I should quit.”
Annie Duke in Quit