Book Review: Quit
Another book review
I don’t think I’ve ever done a formal book review so lower your expectations with this one. FWIW, I usually only finish 10-15% of the books I start. I’ll take a look on the book Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke.
I appreciate when there are chapter summaries at the end of each chapter. That helps me remember key points if I happen to put the book down or (more likely) get pulled away from reading once I start. I can easily reference these later to job my memory.
I’ve made some notes on the key concepts that resonated with me and added in some personal detail. These are not in order or are they overly comprehensive.
Some Key Concepts that resonated with me
If you sticking with something, you are by definition not quitting.
If you quit on time, it won’t feel dire at the moment. The potential outcomes at this time are not certain and the negatives do not far outweigh the positives. Therefore it isn’t an open and shut case to quit. By the time things look so negative that you should quit, the optimal time to quit has passed.
Once we quit we don’t usually track (potential) outcomes if that is even possible. Of course we can do that with investing, but that even if you end up with a positive outcome, it doesn’t mean your process if flawed.
The greater the suck costs the harder it is to quit. It seems so easy to dig our heels in and think about all the energy we have sunk into an endeavor. The obvious is relationships or careers where we feel so committed to a person or role or company.
The instruction to treat a decision as a new one (for example owning a stock is the same as buying it today) did practically nothing to reduce the escalation of commitment. This goes against something I hear all the time on podcasts related to investing. I have tried this, but really I can confirm I am not thinking with 100% clear and objective judgement. And layer on the decision that moving any capital in microcaps has a large liquidity drag. If you are up on a position, it’s so easy to look at when you purchased and see it a large gain (even if it’s way down from it’s peak) outperforming the market. It’s hard to think that every day during that holding period you were making a decision to hold it. For example, I have outperformed pretty much all indexes with my long term (8-9yr) holding in Sangoma. During that time it was quite obvious (at least to me) to hold or add to the position. And it was obvious that there were times to sell or lighten up. I did well at buying and adding. And I did horribly at selling and/or trimming during the run up. I could take some victory laps on the position if I wanted to optimize for followers.
State and dates are a great way to identify when an endeavor is no longer worth pursuing. I have actually used this with my oldest son when he wants to start a new extracurricular activity or quit an old. Rather than making a potentially impulsive decision, we use states and dates to help guide the conversation.
We may quickly outgrow the made-up childhood tales of frightening ogres, dragons, and witches. The scary stories that replace them, about the judgments of others, continue to torment us as adults but are no more real. This hit home for me. Despite writing (inconsistently) for over 10 years, I still feel such shame when I make a spelling mistake or post something with a simply numerical error. Realistically it takes more courage to put yourself out there for others to see/judge than it does to be a troll others.
Be picky about what you stick to. Persevere in the things that matter, that bring you happiness, and that move you toward your goals. Quit everything else, to free up those resources so you can pursue your goals and stop sticking to things that slow you down. I have struggled with this when it comes to lifting weights as I get older and the strength gains are harder and harder to achieve. I still want to be healthy but the injury risk and recovery time get longer as you get stronger and older. Mis-grooving a 300lb squat when I was 30 is not as scary to me as mis-grooving a 450lb squat when I’m 40. Having said that, the joy I get from lifting has shifted from the reward of hitting PRs on the platform every couple months to the enjoy of putting in the work and refining my programming to peak properly for meets.
Optimism unchecked by realism prevents you from quitting when you ought to walk away. I think of a younger version of myself when I first started out blindly following quantitative measures for analyzing companies. I underperformed for a long time until I realized that my style needed to couple quantitative with qualitative. Not saying that works for everyone, but for me it was a must.
Finish lines are funny things. You either reach them or you don’t. You either succeed or you fail. There is no in between. Progress along the way matters very little. When we consider how off base our intuition is that we will walk away when circumstances make it clear that we ought to, these marathon runners help us to understand why we’ve got it so wrong. Once you start the race, success is only measured against crossing the finish line. And even a broken leg won’t make us quit when facing the choice between falling short or continuing on in pain.
Progress along the way should count for something, but we discard it because goals are pass-fail, all-or-nothing, yes-or-no. There’s no partial credit given.
Inflexible goals aren’t a good fit for a flexible world. Altogether, the pass-fail nature of goals can impede progress, cause escalation of commitment, and stop us from considering the progress we make along the way as a success. I have had a goal to squat 500lb for what feels like forever. First it was by the end of 2020 after I squatted 485lb in March 2020. I still haven’t squatted 500lb (or even 485lb) since then. Have I failed? Well technically yes. I have probably worked out 600 times since then and other lifts have progressed and my body feels well enough to keep with little kids. So yeah I haven’t hit my old squat goal. My goals now have shifted to process focused goals.
What makes it so hard to quit, if we were to sum up everything that we’ve talked about, is that when we quit, we fear two things: that we’ve failed, and that we’ve wasted our time, effort, or money. We need to redefine what “failed” and “wasted” mean. When we worry that quitting means we’ve failed, what exactly are we failing at? If you quit something that’s no longer worth pursuing, that’s not a failure. That’s a success.
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. This is so interesting as you now have time and energy to focus on things that bring joy and you can really grow with.
Forced quitting may force you into something that ends up being good for you. It may not feel like it at the time, but once you regroup mentally you can focus on something else. It may be something that you didn’t think you would enjoy.
The book recommends getting a quitting coach that can help you with quitting decisions. I think this is a great idea. Having a friend or colleague that can diplomatically help you frame quit decisions is priceless. The amount of energy and resources that go into something you should have quit long ago is valuable.
I hope you enjoyed this book review. I may review another, or I may not. Who knows….
Have you read this book or anything interesting recently? Comment down below or shoot me a message.
Thanks,
Dean