When should we commit, grit or quit?
TLDR: This article is about the factors that drive success in individuals and organisations. Some of these factors have complex interactions. For example, knowing when to quit when something isn’t working may conflict with the desire to build grit and resilience.
Recently I heard a really great interview on Adam Grant’s podcast with Annie Duke, a Psychology researcher who left academia to become a poker professional. She’s the author of a book called “Quit - The power of knowing when to walk away” and their conversation focused on the question “when should we quit and when should we grit?” Before going into the meat of this post, I have to confess my love of this interview is coloured by the fact that Annie’s experience is right up my street - I played a lot of poker in my younger years and am currently doing a postgraduate psychology degree.
The whole conversation is really worth a listen, but there were a few broad take-aways that are definitely worth highlighting:
There are lots of cognitive biases that prevent us from quitting as much as we should (sunk costs, we get emotionally attached, we attribute failure to circumstances and success to ourselves, etc…)
These biases tend to lead to escalation of commitment to these unsuccessful paths
To pre-empt these biases, we should set “kill conditions” that are measurable and objective before we begin projects
We should have friends or colleagues hold us to account, because people are much better at judging when others should quit than when they should quit
These four points are not that widely understood, but even if you are aware of them the biases are still hard to avoid. While the topic of why we struggle to quit is interesting, the main reason I found the conversation so interesting is how quitting interacts with research about two other factors that drive success: demonstrating grit and taking long shots.
Grit is the idea that your ability to persevere through difficulty is a major factor in your success. Angela Duckworth’s excellent book goes into this topic in more detail, but the idea is perseverance and passion, together, are crucial to high performance in a wide array of fields. For instance she finds levels of grit are one of the best predictors of passing extremely strenuous military assessments for US cadets at West Point. Levels of grit also predict college graduation rates in deprived areas and “gritty” healthcare organisations achieve better patient outcomes. This is because lots of practice and passion makes you improve performance, and persistent improvement opens up opportunities that were not available at lower levels of performance. Moreover, having grit is not something that magically appears later in life: often people who are “gritty” develop that resilience over time by practicing pushing through adversity in other domains.
But therein lies the rub. Annie Duke is telling us success is a function of quitting at the right time, but Angela Duckwork is highlighting the importance of gritting through difficulty (i.e., you shouldn’t quit when things get hard). The difficulty is understanding whether any particular difficult impass is is a “quit” moment or a “grit” moment. Ultimately I think it’s a function of scale and stakes.
In terms of scale, you can often quit small projects within a bigger mission that you grit through. Angela Duckworth’s research focused on long-term goal setting, especially when it comes to organisations. The right balance of building expertise or success is likely a function of micro-quitting and macro-gritting. You should be quitting ineffective strategies so you can spend more time on the most effective ones. But, do so in service of a stable, long-term, bigger goal that you are passionate about. This balance of persistent in objective and agility in short-term strategies allows us to build resilience while avoid time wasting.
In terms of stakes, research by Daniel Kahneman into individuals and Amy Edmondson into fearless organisations highlights the importance of our tolerance for failure. The higher our tolerance for failure is, the more we feel able to grit through and lower our tolerance for failure the greater the importance of quitting sooner rather than later. Helpfully, we can modulate our tolerance for failure by constraining the “rules of the game”.
For instance, instead of launching a massive initiative you can instead test it out by running a time-bound pilot. Piloting and testing larger projects is a practice which can increase the tolerance you have for failure. The success of a pilot is not necessarily to succeed but instead to provide evidence-based learning. Pilots often don’t work, so when a pilot goes wrong it’s not a huge surprise.
On the other side, staking more personal accountability on the outcome of a project will reduce your tolerance for failure. Sometimes once a project has been running for a long time, we may feel less and less pressure to prove its value. However, we have to be wary of changing the rules of the game after we’ve already started playing - that’s exactly how we can amplify the biases that Annie and Adam spoke about. Choosing to lower the stakes of a project that is already failing is a classic way of justifying not quitting early enough. It will waste your time and energy, and life is too short to spend time on things you know aren’t working. To avoid this temptation to move the goalposts, Annie recommends objective measurable kill conditions. Let’s say imagine a company is launching a new product line and we set a kill condition of “if we don’t have 1000 daily active users after 1 year, we refocus out time on something else”. When you hit that one year mark, you can measure against what your past self thought success would look like. Of course, you might not like the outcome or feel like circumstances differed from what you originally expected but having the clear target forces you to be more introspective. And many of the excuses you might make for not hitting the target may sound an awful lot like the biases we mentioned earlier.
A second concept related to the idea of success is how we perceive low probability events. For a whole host of reasons, we are just really bad at understanding probability. When it comes to more extreme probabilities our estimation abilities get even worse (because we don’t experience them often, we lack expertise and we have biases related to psychological distance & loss/gain framing). In addition, we underestimate the odds that we will withstand emotional difficulty (“Thinking fast and slow” has some great analysis of affective forecasting) and we underestimate the odds that others will help us (related work by Heidi Grant).
One of the consequences of all of this is that many of us take fewer long shots than we should (especially in situations where fear of failure is disproportionate to the cost of failure). This interacts with quitting, because trying lots of long shots only works if you know when to quit them. Long shots are by their nature low probability events. So if we want to try to take more long shots, we will inevitably have to quit a lot of them. And conversely creating a more effective quitting environment might be an effective way of encouraging people to take more long shots.
One upside of taking more long shots is that success is a numbers game. Most startups fail, but serial entrepreneurs tend to be successful. Volume of experiences (especially unsuccessful ones) drive your speed of learning. Low probability and difficult domains are less crowded spaces and being first to an idea can mean you generate much more value. Of course, it costs time, energy and money to try lots of different ideas, which is why starting lean and quitting early is especially key. Testing if an idea has legs can be remarkably low cost (see examples of tech companies using vapourware to understand if an idea can get traction), but quitting the ideas that don’t seem to be working is key.
Finally, you never make quitting or gritting decisions in isolation. The work environment you are in or the people around your personal life always modulate the decisions you are going to make. If you work in a politically fraught organisation quitting a project may be seen as failure, so you will just continue on initiatives you know you should quit. If you have a child and your partner is relying on your income, the stakes of starting your own business may be much higher than they would be otherwise. Being aware of these interpersonal factors can inform how we understand our decisions and the decisions of others. If you are a leader in an organisation think about your role in creating a culture where people feel comfortable to quit unsuccessful ideas. For example, Google X (a “moonshot” team which worked on big experimental ideas) used to give out prizes for people who successfully pulled the plug on ideas that weren’t working. They created a culture where “fail fast” was taken very seriously, and you can hear this seriousness in the public interviews with their company leadership. Effective leadership in this area involves creating an environment where people feel safe to quit projects that aren’t working and where people are held to account using objective success measure by their peers.
So long story short, quitting is important but so is gritting. The balance between the two is a matter of scale and stakes. Creating the right environment to quit unsuccessful ideas early gives your and your teams permission to take more long shots, which in turn can drive success in less crowded domains. But creating that “safe to quit” environment is hard because of all the biases that drive us to escalate commitment to failing causes.
So set kill criteria, praise those that pull the plug on projects that aren’t working and partner up with people who will hold you accountable.