“You must not only have competitiveness, but ability, regardless of the circumstance you face, to never quit.” 

That’s from soccer star Abby Wambach, a woman whose determination to succeed has taken her to the top of the athletic world. Our culture reveres the idea of grit – of persevering no matter what. Often, it also sees quitting as a sign of weakness. 

It’s true that optimism and perseverance can help keep us going in hard times. But they can also motivate us to stick to a losing effort longer than we should. While we usually have to persevere to find success, that doesn’t mean perseverance guarantees we’ll reach our goals. And sometimes, we keep going long after we should quit – with serious consequences. 

The Book “Quit”, by Annie Duke, will help you see the value in quitting and make better decisions about how and when to do it. It shows that success isn’t about blind persistence; it’s about finding the right avenue to pursue. If we don’t, we may end up wasting piles of money on a doomed business or years on a dead-end relationship. 

By learning to quit at the right time, we can avoid grinding through unnecessary misery or wasting time and money we don’t have. This frees us to work toward what we actually value.

Quitting can be a virtue.

There’s something that epitomizes the value of quitting – and it’s called poker. Knowing when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em, as Kenny Rogers famously sang, is the essence of the game. 

Do poker pros rely on grit, persevering through tough times, to win hands? Hardly. In fact, pros fold more than half the time – far more often than amateurs. Poker rookies, in contrast, typically play out their hands. They’re driven by the need to see if they can pull out a miraculous straight – and fearful of losing the money they’ve already bet. How are they rewarded? By losing their shirts. 

In the narrative we spin about success, we have a bias toward “winners.” We fixate on the inspiration of success stories – like that magical, last-minute straight flush. What we don’t highlight are the people who stopped short of their goal – the thing we might call “failure” – and benefited from it. 

But quitting is a wise reaction to changing circumstances, and this makes it a vital skill. 

Take mountain climbing, for example. Each year, many people try to make the ultimate climb to the summit of Mount Everest. A number of them make it. And quite a few die, falling victim to the mountain’s famously hostile environment. People in both categories persevered; some reached their dream, and others succumbed to their fate.

Other climbers, though, make it almost all the way to the top of the world’s tallest mountain – only to turn around and give up because conditions become unsafe or they run out of time. These people make a choice that often saves their lives. 

If there’s one thing to learn from these sensible climbers and poker pros, it’s this: quitting can be a virtue. And it’s definitely not something to be ashamed of. In the next sections, we’ll look deeper into the benefits of quitting – and when and how to bow out.

We often keep going for way too long.

Stewart Butterfield’s big goal was to create a successful online computer game. What he ended up building was an enormously profitable communications tool. But he was only able to do this because he had the wisdom to quit. 

Butterfield’s company, Tiny Speck, was armed with millions in investment capital. It had created a game called “Glitch” that attracted rave reviews and a small but passionate fan base. 

But his business model depended on building up subscribers. Unfortunately, even as a marketing blitz grew his subscriber base, he realized the math didn’t work. The company wasn’t going to make it with the current strategy. So Butterfield made a startling decision – with investors still confident and subscriber numbers rising, he decided to call it quits. 

Many of us hang on far too long, fighting for our goals to the bitter end. We do this because we feel we’re losing an opportunity by quitting – and that we’re giving up on something we’ve put a lot of effort into. But by not quitting, we’re actually costing ourselves other opportunities we could have been pursuing. 

Butterfield quit, but he was a long way from being done. He rolled the investment money into an internal communications tool his team had been using. It was a little something called “Slack.” Butterfield soon sold Slack for $27.7 billion – and helped change the way teams communicate. 

So, how can you harness the power of quitting in your own life?

One way to think about whether it’s time to quit is by considering expected value. This involves some mental time travel. Start by looking ahead. Calculate the possible outcomes of decisions – both potential gains and potential losses. These outcomes might not necessarily be money. They could be about time or fulfillment or stress level. When you’re done, look over the results, and consider alternate options for how you could be using your time – just remember to calculate the expected value for those as well. 

Considering when to quit like this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take risks. Sometimes, big risks have enormous potential payoffs. But you need to calculate your risks and be realistic about them. That’s what Butterfield did, and it’s how top poker players win millions. It may set you on a more rewarding course. 

Sunk cost fallacy (and other barriers to quitting)

Imagine you’re offered a ticket to an outdoor concert, but the weather is going to be terrible. Even if you love the band, a free ticket probably won’t be enough to entice you to suffer through it. But what if you’ve already bought the ticket? You’ll be tempted to go so you don’t waste the money. 

Of course, it shouldn’t matter if the ticket was free or cost money. You’ll be miserable either way. But still, you think of the two situations differently.

This is the fallacy known as sunk cost. The more resources we invest, the more likely we are to try to continue, even if it’s a bad idea. We convince ourselves that we’re avoiding waste.

Another example is finishing a college degree in a field you don’t enjoy just because you’ve already spent a lot of money. What happens if you don’t quit? You’ll spend even more money and time just to end up in a career you hate. 

This is like an optical illusion. And it’s very powerful. Even if you understand what’s going on, you still see the illusion. 

Another barrier to smart quitting is what’s called an escalation of commitment.

Once people decide on a certain course, they often become more committed, even if it’s not working out. Rather than admit their mistake, they refuse to quit – sometimes in the face of enormous cost. 

In the Vietnam War, it soon became apparent that the fighting was costly and unwinnable. So what did leaders do? They doubled down, leaving a trail of napalm and bitterness behind them. The war ended up costing tens of thousands of American lives and $1 trillion in today’s money. It also had profound consequences for political leaders and created backlash against the US government. 

Then there’s the endowment effect, which was identified by Richard Thaler – the researcher who coined sunk cost. The endowment effect is when we overvalue something we have in comparison to something we don’t.

This ownership extends to our ideas and decisions. When we meet milestones toward a goal or take part in decision-making, we increase our ownership, which magnifies the effect. We also tend to stick with the status quo, preferring to keep things as they’ve always been. 

For example, if team management signs a star player to a big contract, it may be harder for the team to bench or trade that athlete if she performs poorly. Management “owns” that decision and values the player more highly than a similar player who wasn’t part of a significant investment decision. 

All these traits work together to make quitting extremely difficult. But if we’re aware of them, we can take steps to come out on top.

Your identity can get in the way of you quitting.

Sears was a colossal retail powerhouse. It built an extremely successful mail order business in the 1800s, delivering goods to rural residents. Later, with the rise of retail stores, Sears continued building its empire by switching to that model. But with stiffer competition and a changing market, Sears began a long, inexorable decline. 

The company had a potential way out. Along with retail, it had built up a lucrative financial services branch, which included Allstate Insurance, Discover Card, and Coldwell Banker real estate brokers. But it didn’t choose that path. Instead of shifting out of a losing market, Sears sold these successful businesses to finance its retail operation and keep the core of its identity. You can probably guess how this all ended: bankruptcy. 

Our identities are especially powerful in our decision-making. And when they’re wrapped up in our careers or ventures, it can make quitting particularly difficult. 

The idea of cognitive dissonance plays into this. When confronted with information or facts that challenge our beliefs, we’re uncomfortable – we experience dissonance. To deal with this, we can either change our beliefs, which may be core to our identities, or we can explain away the information. Usually, we do the latter rather than admit we were wrong. 

Contrast Sears with Philips, which began life as a light bulb company. Philips later added electronics, and both components were a big part of its business as late as 2012. But Philips, too, faced a changing market – and had options. Philips had long been involved in health care. Rather than sticking with its core identity, the company relinquished its less profitable light bulbs and electronics sectors. And after the switch, the new company was able to bring in almost €20 billion in annual sales. 

This just goes to show that the powerful grip of identity can be broken. 

Countering our tendencies

We’ve talked a lot about how hard it is to quit when we should. Research has shown it’s almost impossible to avoid these mental hangups. But we haven’t discussed the incredible juggling monkey yet. Wait . . . what?! Let’s explain.

Eric “Astro” Teller, an entrepreneur and academic who helped lead Alphabet’s X branch, is a quitting specialist. His company focuses on big ideas – ones that can change the world – and clearly doesn’t waste much time on creative company names. Because they invest so much money, they have to be willing to ditch ideas that aren’t working and use that money on better ones. If they can’t bring an idea to market and make it profitable in five to ten years, they aren’t interested. 

One way the X team analyzes projects is with a colorful metaphor. If you want to launch a traveling show featuring a monkey juggling flaming torches on a pedestal, you’ll likely draw a big crowd – but you have to figure out how to do it first. The pedestal part is easy, and you can fool yourself into thinking you’re making progress by taking care of that. But you still have to train a monkey to juggle objects that are on fire. If you can’t tackle that, you don’t have a show. 

X identifies the monkeys and pedestals in each project. The team refuses to go forward if they haven’t figured out how to overcome the main challenge. 

Once you embark on a project, it really helps to set so-called kill criteria. This involves setting measurable benchmarks. If you don’t meet them, you quit. Criteria could include a spending level, a deadline, or buy-in from a client.

One way to develop kill criteria is by doing a premortem – imagine your project’s future death. What “were” the warning signs?

Your kill criteria will help you counter harmful thinking, like the sunk cost fallacy. 

The problem with goals

Believe it or not, more than one marathon runner has broken a bone and finished the race – in excruciating pain – anyway. 

Goals can be incredibly helpful in motivating us to accomplish difficult things. But they also come with a big downside – they can blind us to circumstances, make us inflexible, and actually keep us in negative situations. Like worsening an injury by running with a broken bone. 

Part of the reason for this is the finish line mentality. The finish line mentality means you don’t see any accomplishment in completing just part of your goal. It’s a pass/fail situation. 

Goals create a false choice: finish, or don’t bother starting. These goals, though, are often arbitrary and ignore all of our accomplishments along the way.

Look at it this way. Runners who fail to run a marathon might go the same distance as a successful 5K run. Mountain climbers who get almost to the top of Everest have still done something that few other humans – or even mountain climbers – have managed.

When we decide on mountain climbs or other goals, our information is incomplete –  circumstances change, and we change. But our goals are fixed. And they often stay that way.

You can keep goals flexible and realistic by coming up with “unless” options. This means you’re going to strive for the goal unless A, B, or C happens. For instance, unless the person you’re dating isn’t interested in commitment. Unless you’re not making a profit by year three.

Think about this the next time you’re tempted to run with a fractured fibula.

We fear quitting because we fear failure

We’re afraid of wasting all the valuable resources we’ve poured into an effort. We have to recognize, though, that our definitions of failure and waste may simply be wrong. Being able to quit a situation that’s not benefiting you is a vital skill. And even if you’re satisfied where you are, keep your eyes out for other options – circumstances may change. You may just find that quitting leads you to success. 

Get a quitting coach!Has anyone ever told you, after you finally quit a terrible job, that they knew you’d been miserable for months? They didn’t mention it because they didn’t want to hurt your feelings. 

Quitting is difficult, so an outside perspective can help you confront your biases and rationalizations. This is where a “quitting coach” comes in – someone who’s willing to tell you the hard truth and work with you to find the right path. The truth might be hard to hear, but it’ll save you trouble down the road.