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
I lead teams at the intersection of strategy and design. Autodidact. Polymath. Barbecue acolyte. I start fires (the good kind).
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
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
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
By definition, anybody who has succeeded at something has stuck with it. That’s a statement of fact, always true in hindsight. But that doesn’t mean that the inverse is true, that if you stick to something, you will succeed at it.
Annie Duke in Quit
we started by working with the sales team to generate a list of signals that would tell them that an opportunity wasn’t worth pursuing. To do that, we sent out the following prompt to the sellers and the sales leadership: Imagine you were pursuing a lead that came through an RFP (request for proposal) or RFI (request for information). It’s six months from now, and you have lost the deal. Looking back, you realize there were early signals that the deal was not going to close. What were they?
Annie Duke in Quit
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