Persistence is not always the best decision, certainly not absent context. And context changes. (Location 209)
That’s the funny thing about grit. While grit can get you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, grit can also get you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile. The trick is in figuring out the difference. (Location 211)
By definition, anybody who has succeeded at something has stuck with it. That’s a statement of fact, always true in hindsight. But that doesn’t mean that the inverse is true, that if you stick to something, you will succeed at it. (Location 228)
People stick to things all the time that they don’t succeed at, sometimes based on the belief that if they stick with it long enough, that will lead to success. (Location 235)
Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest. (Location 238)
The second is that making a plan for when to quit should be done long before you are facing the quitting decision. It recognizes, as Daniel Kahneman has pointed out, that the worst time to make a decision is when you’re “in it.” (Location 387)
Grit is what gets you up the mountain, but quit is what tells you when to come down. (Location 460)
That’s why, if I had to skill somebody up to get them to be a better decision-maker, quitting is the primary skill I would choose, because the option to quit is what allows you to react to that changing landscape. (Location 466)
for each of us on an individual level, the road to happiness is not in sticking blindly to the thing that we’re doing, as so many aphorisms cajole us to do. We need to see what’s going on around us so we can do whatever will maximize our happiness and our time and our well-being. (Location 569)
Kenny Rogers sang in The Gambler, “You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, and know when to run.” (Location 574)
Sticking with a course of action is the only way to find out for sure how it will turn out. Quitting requires being okay with not knowing what might have been. (Location 634)
When you quit, you live to fight another day, sometimes literally. (Location 710)
Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early. (Location 728)
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There is a well-known heuristic in management consulting that the right time to fire someone is the first time it crosses your mind. (Location 752)
When you are doing something that you already know you can accomplish, you’re not learning anything important about whether the endeavor is worth pursuing. You already know you can build the pedestal. The problem is whether you can train the monkey. (Location 1902)
Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress. (Location 1924)