The Skill They Never Teach

Knowing When to Quit

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A famous climber was supposed to tackle the world’s most famous rock, El Capitan. His friend was making a documentary about him. It was going to be huge. Then Alex Honnold sprained his ankle. After a partial recovery, he tried to make the climb. About halfway up, he did something unthinkable.

He quit.

The big deal was that Honnold was making the climb without a rope. One slip, and he would’ve fallen to his death. He didn’t quit because he was scared. He listened to his body, and his body told him it wasn’t ready.

A year later, he tried again.

The second time, he made it. His friend finished the documentary. It won an Oscar. The world praised Honnold as one of the greatest athletes of all time. That’s what quitting gets you, a second chance.

Not everyone understands the value of knowing when to quit. In fact, it’s probably one of the most untaught skills out there.

A Berkeley professor named Barry Staw started studying the failure to quit in the 1970s, after watching his father throw away a fortune. Harold Staw started one of the first modern department stores in the country. He made it rich. Then he went bankrupt trying to compete with Kmart. He poured his own money into a handful of failing stores. He lost everything.

His son Barry developed a term called escalating commitment. It’s similar to the sunk-cost fallacy, developed later. Basically, losing makes you want to win even more, and it tricks you into committing more and more time and energy into failing ventures, thinking you can save them. A couple of psychologists named Joel Brockner and Jeffrey Rubin developed Staw’s ideas further. In 1985, they published Entrapment in Escalating Conflicts.

Around the same time, Richard Thaler introduced the idea of sunk cost fallacy in 1980, the idea that the time and money you've already committed to a failed project provide a good reason to keep going.

Since then, psychologists and sociologists have documented countless examples of companies and entire countries pouring billions into failed ideas, even when they knew deep down it was a waste.

They couldn’t help themselves.

Meanwhile, animals know when to quit. In 2019, a team of scientists played a cruel little trick on some mice. They built a device that delivered sugar for poking their snouts up a hole, gradually reducing the reward each time. Eventually, the mice were poking their snouts up the hole 20 times. That was their breaking point. After about 20 pokes, they gave up. When studying the mice's brains, the scientists found something interesting. Before giving up, there was a surge of a chemical called nociceptin, the opposite of dopamine.

Our brains also produce nociceptin.

It tells us when to quit.

The scientists published their results in Cell, speculating about the possibility of helping humans with depression by artificially lowering the levels of nociceptin in their brains. Pardon me, but I think the scientists missed the point of their own study. Mice that give up after poking their snouts up a hole 20 times for sugar don’t have a problem. We’re the ones with the problem.

We don’t know when to quit.

We’ve learned the opposite habit, poking our noses up holes hundreds of times, even when there’s no sugar to be had.

Why is that?

Well, we live in a culture that promotes endless trying, and it’s not healthy. Look at our books, our podcasts, our internet. You can find a thousand influencers who say the same thing over and over: Never give up. It’s in hundreds of blockbuster movies. It’s in thousands of song lyrics. It’s on millions of bumper stickers. It’s in countless commercials, on countless billboards.

We’re a culture that doesn’t give up.

We keep poking.

That’s a problem, because in the real world, there’s plenty of times when you should give up and rethink your current plan. It’s a sign of a healthy mind to know when to quit, but we judge anyone who does.

There's one strategy to avoid all this.

It's called kill criteria.

Annie Duke used kill criteria to become a world-class poker champion. Before going into a game or tournament, she identified clear stopping points, like losing a certain amount of money or a certain number of hands. She stuck to them. It was knowing when to quit that made her successful. She explores the psychology of quitting in her book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away.

The idea of kill criteria has become a life-saving strategy for everyone from business investors to military commanders. They decided up front when they would quit. They identified trigger points. They stuck to them.

Nobody ever teaches us the valuable skill of knowing when to quit. Nobody tells us there’s no shame in giving up. Nobody tells us that giving up can actually open our lives to new opportunities. If so, it’s rare.

I’ve used kill criteria to decide when I should give up certain pursuits. I’ve used them on everything from creative projects to financial investing. They saved me months or even years of pain. I’m glad I used them.

It was hard to quit, but I’ve never regretted it. Each time, it led me down a new path toward something better. The trick is that we don’t just quit and then wallow in failure. We quit. We take a breather. We ground ourselves. We rest. Then we get back to life. Quitting doesn’t mean you have to abandon a thing forever. It means you’re liberating yourself from the commitment. You’re not going to let it trap you. When you start to feel trapped, when you feel like you have to keep going, even if you don’t want to, that’s probably the best sign that it’s time to quit.

That’s the difference between good quitting and bad quitting. Good quitting feels like a relief. It feels like freedom.

A lot of times, you don’t even have to quit.

You can just scale back.

When you quit something, you’re not giving up on yourself. You’re giving yourself permission (and space) to try something else. It doesn’t have to be a negative experience. It can make you feel good.

It takes discipline. It takes confidence.

It can be good for you.