Annie Duke on the Power of Quitting

Annie Duke: Well, I’m happy to be here, Russ.

Annie Duke: Yeah. So, yeah, the fact that it’s called Quit and rhymes with Grit is not accidental. That is by design. So, let me just first say that I really don’t have any quibble with the book Grit. I think everybody should go and read it.

I do have a quibble with some of the takeaways that people take from it. Which is not anything on Angela Duckworth’s part, because these are not the takeaways she would wish that people took from it.

Here’s the issue: is that grit and quit–those two decisions–are the same decision, and we don’t think of them that way. We think of them as polar opposites.

But, I mean, if you think about it logically, any day that I choose to stay in my job is a day I’m choosing not to quit. Any day that I quit my job is a day I’m choosing not to stay.

And so, at any moment, given that we’ve started something, we have a choice whether to stick with it or to go and shift and do something else.

And, where we get into trouble is with the calibration issue. Right? Like, when is the right time to quit? When is the right time to stick to things?

And, my quibble with the takeaways about grit in general is that grit is good. Grit is a virtue. The people who persevere are the heroes of our stories. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Quitters never win. Winners never quit.

Like, Russ, if I called you a quitter, would I be complimenting you?

Annie Duke: No, I’d be insulting you.

And, in fact, if you look up ‘quitter’ in a thesaurus, you’ll see that one of the synonyms is coward.

And, that’s where I really–that’s where I kind of get mad. Right? And, it’s a little bit why the title of the book is so in-your-face, because I am kind of mad about that. Because, I think that it does incredible damage to people in terms of their ability to actually achieve their goals, because people are getting stuck in things that just really aren’t worthwhile. It isn’t worth them sticking to them for fear that somehow, like, if they quit, they’re a loser, or a failure, or people are going to judge them harshly for it. A variety of reasons that they won’t do it.

And, the opportunity costs associated with that are so great, separate and apart from the ground that you’re losing just by sticking to a loser, anyway. Right?

And, I think it’s tragic. And we need to start saying: Quitting is a skill, and it’s one that you should get good at. Because, unlike the idea that if you stick to things, you’ll be successful. No, if you stick to the stuff that’s worthwhile, you’ll be successful, but you got to quit the rest.

Annie Duke: Yeah. Okay. So, let me just give credit where credit is due. When I started working on the book, it was during the pandemic. And so, I asked a whole bunch of people that I know to get on Zooms with me. And, one of them was Phil Tetlock, author of Superforecasting–really brilliant man. And, they all knew that I wanted to talk about this concept of quitting. And, I got on the call with him and he said, ‘I’ve been thinking about this in relation to grit. And, I think it’s wonderful because the opposite of a great virtue is also a great virtue.’

So, he was making a play on: The opposite of a great truth is also a great truth. I think that what we need to understand is that everything has upsides and downsides. So, grit is a virtue when you’re sticking to things through the hard times because the goal that you’re trying to reach is worth it.

And, that is indeed a virtue because we don’t–when your kid goes out on the soccer field and just has one really bad game and storms off the field and says, ‘I want to quit’, you don’t want them to do that. Overall, if they enjoy soccer, if you think that it’s something that they’re getting great benefit out of, you want to teach them that it’s a virtue to be able to take the downs in order to achieve the ups. Right?

That being said, quitting is also a virtue because if they get a concussion on the field, you don’t want them to continue the game. And, that’s what we have to remember, is that in circumstances where the world has given us new information that tells us that what we’re doing is no longer worthwhile, it is virtuous to quit.

And, in fact, I would say that there’s certain cases where it becomes a moral imperative to quit. Yeah. So, I’ll give you just a brief example of moral imperative to quit.

So, let’s say–let me come at it from two different ways. So, there’s a wonderful story of quitting that occurs on the top of Mount Everest. It, in fact, opens the chapter that says the opposite of a great virtue is also a great virtue. And, I think that we think of people who climb Everest as sort of the epitome of grittiness–that these are the stories that you’re telling about grittiness. But there’s a wonderful story about quittiness that’s there. So, this story is about Dr. Stuart Hutchinson, John Taske, and Lou Kasischke, and they’re climbing up Everest. They’re part of one of those climbing expeditions in the 1990s that were very popular. There’s eight climbers, three climbing sherpas, and an expedition leader. And, on Summit Day where you leave from Camp Four–so you’ve already done quite a bit of climbing up to Camp Four from base camp–you leave at midnight.

And, the expedition leader has set a turnaround time. So, what’s a turnaround time? It’s no matter where you are on the mountain, if you’re not at the summit by 1:00 PM, you must turn around. Pretty simple. The reason why the turnaround time is 1:00 PM is because they don’t want people to descend what’s called the southeast ridge in darkness. It’s a very narrow part of the mountain. It’s very easy to slip if you can’t see what you’re doing. And, if you fall, you’re either going to fall to your death into Nepal or fall to your death into Tibet. Take your pick. Neither of them, I assume, would you like to do.

All right: so our three climbers, Hutchinson, Taske, and Kasischke, are climbing. And, this was at a time when the mountain was starting to get crowded and they got basically literal traffic jams on the mountain trying to get up to the summit because so many people were trying to go at once.

So, it’s very slow going on this day. And, their expedition leader comes up behind them and Hutchinson says to the expedition leader, ‘Hey, what time do you think it’s going to be? How long do you think it’s going to be until we get to the summit?’ And, the expedition leader says ‘Three hours.’ Goes on ahead to sort of try to make up some ground and get to the summit himself. Hutchinson holds Taske and Kasischke back and says, ‘We have a problem. If it’s going to be three hours to the summit, it’s already 11:30 AM. Seems to me we’re not going to get to the summit until 2:30. That’s well past the turnaround time. So, it appears we have butted up against that and we have to turn around now.’ So, they did. And they lived.

Now, Russ, I’m sure it’s obvious to you why you’ve never heard this story. Like, where’s the drama, right?

I mean, three climbers followed the rules. They turned around, they lived. Like, nobody’s making a movie out of it. Except they did. They were part of the climbing expedition chronicled in John Krakauer’s Into Thin Air. Rob Hall was their expedition leader, in fact, the one who told them that it was three hours to the summit. Rob Hall, I think we all know, went to the top of the mountain, got there at two, an hour past the turnaround time, waited for Doug Hansen to get there until four, and they both perished atop the mountain. They never made it a bit down. They were on top of the summit.

So, you might say, ‘Okay, well if it was in the book and also in the movies, maybe they just didn’t talk about them because what a boring story.’ But, they did. They said they were the best climbers on the mountain.

And so, first of all, the thing number one is: Why don’t we even know who they are? In all of this drama, here are these people who quit beautifully and turned around and lived and yet we don’t even remember them. So, I think that’s important because even people who persevere in conditions that are bad, past the turnaround time that he himself had set and perish, we still admire them. We still consider them the heroes of our story.

But, this is where I think we get into a moral imperative to be good quitters, which is: Hutchinson, Taske, and Kasischke all had families. Two of them were doctors; they had patients. And don’t they have a moral imperative to turn around in that situation? They know that they should, the probability of death is too high. And, now they have people that they can go back to and continue on with their lives and make those people’s lives richer for their presence in them.

And so that, I think, gets a little bit at this idea of moral imperative.

I think the other place where you can see a moral imperative is quite common in, for example, in startup culture, where a startup will be clearly failing; someone will say, ‘Hey, it seems like it’s not going well. You’re not hitting any of your benchmarks. You’re missing all your targets. You haven’t achieved product market fit–whatever–it seems like you should shut it down.’

And, people will say, ‘But I owe it to my employees.’ So, they’re using the language of duty here: I have a duty to my employees to keep it going. But, if we think about it, they actually have a duty to quit. Why? Because once they’ve determined that the equity isn’t worthwhile–and startup employees are generally working for very low cash comp when compared to what they could get on the market, but they’re working for equity that they deem to be possibly life-changing. Once the founder has determined that equity is not worth it, they have a duty to the employee to allow them to go, so that they can go get paid what they deserve. Whether that’s at a new startup, where they’re going to be working for equity that has more value, or whether it’s in an enterprise where they’re just going to get salaried at their market rate.

So, I think that we turn that on its head,right? We say: ‘I have a duty to stick it out because I’ve convinced these employees to come work for me for no money and equity. And so, I got to keep trying.’ Except that the minute that you’ve determined that equity isn’t worthwhile, the duty is actually the opposite. Just to shut it down and let them go free.

Annie Duke: But, you also have to learn how to say yes.

Annie Duke: That’s right.

Annie Duke: Actually, speaking of Phil Tetlock, during the pandemic when I was somewhat busy, he reached out to me and said, ‘We’re having trouble creating good training for novice forecasters and these counterfactual forecasting problems. You kind of teach this stuff and consult on it. So, maybe you would be able to put it into terms or a voice that would actually create a good training and you could maybe think about the things that actually work with your clients and apply that to this training.’ So, I said, ‘Yes.’ Why? Because I love Phil–and Barb, by the way, his wife–and I was willing to make time for that.

And, that turned into four very large-scale studies that were incredibly fruitful. So, I completely agree with you, right? I’m trying to work on both, right? Being more careful about saying no to things that I’m predicting are not going to be worth my time. And, saying yes to stuff that looks kind of wild and crazy, but wouldn’t that be cool? And, I might learn something super new about myself or something super new about the world. So, I love that example because that’s a good case of, like, the yin and yang, right?

Annie Duke: Yeah, so actually I’d like to–in relation to that, I’d like to bring up a little fact about ants, because I think this goes really well with that. So, you know the song “The Ants Go Marching One by One, Hurrah, Hurrah,” right? So, we know that we have that image. If you’ve seen any cartoon or you’ve actually watched ants on a nature show, they’re marching in a line, right?

Annie Duke: So, those ants are forager ants. They’re a part of the colony that’s meant to go out and find food, basically. And so, if you watch these forager ants approach, like, a new territory, you’ll see that they’re all kind of scattered around. So, they’re not marching in a line, yet. And then, one of them will find food and they’ll take the food and they’ll be carrying it back to the colony.

And, on the way back they lay down a pheromone trail. So, it’s just a chemical trail that the other ants are going to detect.

So, they’re only doing it on the way back: once they’ve found food, they’re laying down this trail.

So, at first it’s pretty faint because it’s only one ant. But, now if another ant detects that trail, it will now go along the trail; it will find the food.

And then, when it’s bringing that food back, it will also lay a pheromone trail down on top of that. And, you can see how this trail is now getting reinforced, attracting more and more ants to the same trail until they’re marching one by one–to whatever, the watermelon that fell on the ground. Right?

So, that’s how we think about them. But, actually if you look at the behavior, once there’s a strong pheromone trail laid down, what you’ll see is about 10 to 15% of the ants don’t actually get with the program. They’re just kind of wandering around.

So, what’s the deal with those ants, right? Are they ant-anarchists? Are they malingerers? Like, what’s the deal with these malingering ants?

And, it turns out no, they’re not anarchists at all. They’re not malingerers. They’re actually serving an incredibly important function for the colony, which is that they are continuing to explore. So, you’ve got the ants that are exploiting the food source that’s high-quality, a watermelon or whatever. But, the other ants are continuing to explore. So, they’re saying yes in that sense, right? They’re like, ‘Yeah, sure, I’ll keep go looking around.’

And, why is that so incredibly important that they’re doing that? Well, first of all, the food source might go away. So, someone might clean the watermelon up. Like, maybe it’s on the back deck or something like that and someone comes out with the hose, and then that watermelon is gone. It’s really good that this 10 to 15% of the colony is continuing to explore other food sources because it means they have backups.

Annie Duke: It’s insurance that allows them to sort of cover–to your point, they’re increasing the chances for serendipity, for finding something else that’s really great.

The other thing–and I think that this is an overlooked point–is that it may be that the food source that they have is totally stable, but the other ants might find a better one. And, that’s the issue of opportunity cost–right?–is that once we’re exploiting something, whether it’s a product that an enterprise is selling, or a hobby that we’re pursuing, or a project, a job, whatever it is, once we’re doing that, we tend to cease to explore.

So, I think it’s funny that a lot of the encouragement is around saying no, because I think we’re actually quite good at saying no, because we actually don’t even consider the possibility of saying yes or no. And, if you don’t consider the possibility of saying yes or no, you’re saying no to all of that stuff by default. Right?

So, what the ants are doing is saying, ‘Well, this is great. I love that. But maybe there’s something better out there.’ And, they’re continuing to explore it. So, it’s serving dual purposes: It’s giving them a backup plan, but it’s also allowing them to find something that really ought to have been their Plan A.

And, I think this relates exactly to what you’re saying, right? And you can see this behavior, this duality in the ants, because they’re doing both things at once. They’re exploiting the food source that’s there, but they’re also continuing to explore and basically say yes to all the other places that you could go look and they’re more likely to find something.

So, obviously we’re not ants. We don’t have a big colony. I can’t clone myself. But, to your point, I can say yes to stuff. And if I say yes to stuff, maybe I’m going to find something there that’s awesome or a good backup plan or better than what I’m already doing.

Annie Duke: Yeah. Well, okay. So, here’s the thing, though. I mean again, it depends on your values: it depends on what the signals for success might be for you. So, for you, it sounds like you don’t feel like you’re going to be successful in a project if you don’t have a collaborator who is equally enthusiastic. That’s what it sounds like.

So, this goes into something that we could call ‘kill criteria.’ If you want to be softer about it, you could call them ‘exit criteria.’ I like the term ‘kill criteria’ for the same reason that I put in very large letters the Quit right on the front of my book because I want people to think about these things this way, in the boldest possible terms.

But, at any rate, so for you as you’re thinking about, ‘Ooh, I’m kind of interested in this idea; I want to explore this. What are the things that would tell me that this isn’t going to be something that’s a really valuable use of my time? Well, if I can’t get a collaborator to be as successful as I am, then I really ought not to do this. So, I’m going to do very little thinking about it. I’m going to form enough of an idea to be able to communicate it to someone who I would like to collaborate with. And, if they’re not as excited and engaged as I am, I already know it’s not going to be worth my time.’ Right?

So, that’s actually a really reasonable way to approach a project. So, I actually approach books that way. When I have an idea for a book, there are a few people that I call. I hardly form the book idea, I’m able–with Quit, it was something like, Quit, the opposite of Grit. I said that. And, I don’t mean, like I said, I don’t mean, like, the opposite, but I mean the dialogue with Grit: that, I think that people in general think that we quit things too early. I think the science tells us that we quit things too late. And, I would really like to explore this topic. That was about what I had.

And, I wrote, I think the first person I wrote was Michael Mogenson. But then, I think Danny Kahneman followed quickly after that, and Phil Tetlock, because I just wanted to see how did they react to that. And, then they were really excited. They were like, ‘Okay, yeah.’ So, then I’m like, ‘Okay, I think now I should go further.’ Right?

So, I’m always sort of pushing to see, like, is this a no or is this a yes? And, I know that if can’t get–if Danny Kahneman thinks it’s a stupid idea and it’s not worth exploring, that’s a really good signal for me. So, I shouldn’t put a whole lot of work into it until I’ve got those gut checks from people who are way smarter than me, much deeper into the science than I am, and are going to tell me whether it’s something that they think is worth putting on a piece of paper.

And obviously this has to do, in particular, with what I like to write about, which is, to be fair, their science. So, if the people who created the science don’t think it’s worth writing about, I’m not going to continue with it.

Annie Duke: And, let me just emphasize that: Especially when we’re young. So, I just want to emphasize that, because I think that, separate and apart from where parents go wrong with that–and they do, they take it too far–but obviously it’s a good lesson to take someone who’s six and has never gone through the downs to see what the ups might be on the back end of it and teach them you don’t need to quit. You can push through it. I agree, especially when they’re young.

The problem is that we think that applies to 30-year-olds. That’s the problem. And it doesn’t, because 30-year-olds aren’t walking off the soccer field. That’s the problem.

Annie Duke: That’s right.

Annie Duke: And, you’re a loser–

Annie Duke: To that point, you know, there was something interesting because these are all cognitive phenomena. Right?

So, one of the things that I want to be clear about is that what we’re talking about is the cognitive state of being in the losses. So, when you think about your balance sheet–right?–like, ‘in the losses’ means that you’re losing from whatever a mark was. Right?

So, if you buy a stock, the mark is going to be the price that you bought it at. And, if you’re below that, you’re ‘in the losses.’ If you’re above it, you’re ‘in the gains.’

So, that would be on an actual ledger, right? On an actual balance sheet. But, we have this mental accounting that occurs, which gets distorted. So, sometimes it overlaps. If I buy a stock at 50 and it’s trading at 40, both on my physical ledger and my cognitive ledger–my mental accounting–I’m in the losses in both.

But, if I buy a stock at 50; it goes up to 75 and is now trading at 60, on my actual physical ledger, I’m in the gains $10. But, in my mental account, I’m in the losses $15 because I’m 15 short of 75 now. Right? Okay? So it doesn’t matter that I was up 10.

So, when we take, like, a marathon–and this really interesting thing about a half-marathon versus a full marathon or where we are in comparison to Everest–if it’s a half-marathon, the goal, the end point, is 13.1 miles. So, if I complete that, I am now no longer in the losses in comparison to that goal. But, if I only complete 13.1 miles in the context of a marathon, I am short 13.1 miles now: I’m in the losses. No matter that, if I created a physical ledger, I would be in the gains 13.1 miles.

In other words, physical ledgers measure from the starting line. But, mental ledgers measure from the finish line.

So, this is the problem we have with Everest, right? I’m 300 feet from the summit. Never mind that I just climbed 29,000 feet in the air. I’m a loser if I turn around because I’m closing that mental account in the losses.

So, if you wonder why does somebody continue past the turnaround time or even get to the summit at 4:00 PM–which is what Doug Hansen did, even though the turnaround time was 1:00 PM–it’s because he was in the losses–

Annie Duke: And, as Richard Thaler–in his head–so, Richard Thaler points out, we do not like to close mental accounts in the losses.

So, anyway, Richard sent me something hilarious. It was like–it’s probably about a year ago and it was a little bit complex. It didn’t end up in the book. But, basically there’s some sort of argument now, among mountaineers, that if you look at, like, the popular peaks that people climb, there’s some argument about what the peak actually is.

Annie Duke: So, now, all of a sudden, they’re saying that a bunch of people who say they’ve done, like, the seven peaks or whatever, the seven summits, maybe they didn’t actually summit them because there is now an argument about what exactly is the top of Everest or what is the top of Tillman Borough[?], which just brings up the absurdity of all of this in the first place. It’s completely absurd, but it’s the way that we work cognitively.