Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away
From the bestselling author of Thinking in Bets comes a toolkit for mastering the skill of quitting to achieve greater success
Business leaders, with millions of dollars down the drain, struggle to abandon a new app or product that just isn’t working. Governments, caught in a hopeless conflict, believe that the next tactic will finally be the one that wins the war. And in our own lives, we persist in relationships or careers that no longer serve us. Why? According to Annie Duke, in the face of tough decisions, we’re terrible quitters. And that is significantly holding us back.
In Quit, Duke teaches you how to get good at quitting. Drawing on stories from elite athletes like Mount Everest climbers, founders of leading companies like Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, and top entertainers like Dave Chappelle, Duke explains why quitting is integral to success, as well as strategies for determining when to hold em, and when to fold em, that will save you time, energy, and money. You’ll learn:
How the paradox of quitting influences decision making: If you quit on time, you will feel you quit early What forces work against good quitting behavior, such as escalation commitment, desire for certainty, and status quo bias How to think in expected value in order to make better decisions, as well as other best practices, such as increasing flexibility in goal-setting, establishing “quitting contracts,” anticipating optionality, and conducting premortems and backcasts
Whether you’re facing a make-or-break business decision or life-altering personal choice, mastering the skill of quitting will help you make the best next move.
Business leaders, with millions of dollars down the drain, struggle to abandon a new app or product that just isn’t working. Governments, caught in a hopeless conflict, believe that the next tactic will finally be the one that wins the war. And in our own lives, we persist in relationships or careers that no longer serve us. Why? According to Annie Duke, in the face of tough decisions, we’re terrible quitters. And that is significantly holding us back.
In Quit, Duke teaches you how to get good at quitting. Drawing on stories from elite athletes like Mount Everest climbers, founders of leading companies like Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, and top entertainers like Dave Chappelle, Duke explains why quitting is integral to success, as well as strategies for determining when to hold em, and when to fold em, that will save you time, energy, and money. You’ll learn:
Whether you’re facing a make-or-break business decision or life-altering personal choice, mastering the skill of quitting will help you make the best next move.
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Community Reviews
This book held a mirror up to me in several ways. First of all, I was surprised that a woman named Annie Duke, who was billed mostly as a former professional poker player was such a good writer. I kept looking for evidence of the ghostwriter who _really_ wrote the book. Shame on me. It turns out that Ms. Duke is Ivy League educated and stopped just short of defending her Ph.D. dissertation in cognitive science. I love this book. Call it confirmation bias, but I feel like this retroactively gave me permission for so many quitting decisions I've made in life. I always knew they were the right choices, but I didn't have any language to explain that until now. We even agree about finish lines and hard goals: the can dangerous and sometimes destructive. I love what she says about waste: "We need to start thinking about waste as a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one. That means realizing that spending another minute or another dollar or another bit of effort on something that is no longer worthwhile is the real waste."
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