Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away

"While my main interest and my main research stream is in impression management, I also come from the school of judgment and decision making as a researcher. I study biases and decision-making shortcuts and the mistakes that we make in that domain. This relates to cognitive psychology and behavioral economics , and one of my favorite biases in this field is sunk-cost fallacy. Management scholars refer to this as escalation of commitment. The idea is that the more you invest your time, emotion, money or resources, the more likely you are to stay in that path, even after it ceases to be optimal for you. It is also called the Gambler’s Fallacy. The gambling mindset is that if you play just one more round, you will recover all the money you have lost. It happens in investing or in a career. One may believe it is too late to switch career paths. It happens in relationships. The longer two individuals have been together, the more reluctant they may be to end the relationship, even if it is no longer serving either of them. I consider myself a fan of sunk-cost fallacy, not because I find it funny but because I often fall victim to it. I find myself staying on a given path for longer than I should, because I am averse to quitting. “Quitting should be viewed as a skill” This connects to impression management via Goffman’s idea of saving face and avoiding embarrassment. One of the reasons we stay on a certain path is because we don’t want to admit that we were wrong. We don’t want to say, I changed my mind, and I’m switching careers. I thought this person was my soulmate, but now I have met someone with whom I am even more compatible. Quitting is tantamount to admitting we have been wrong, which is embarrassing and difficult to do. Quitting should be viewed as a skill. This book showed me that it is a superpower to know when to walk away. I believe I have learned to recognize when it is time to quit. I think we get better at this as the years go by. As a society, we celebrate not giving up. We revere perseverance and determination. While these are important values, I believe that we should also celebrate quitting. Even though quitting may not make the most favorable impression and it’s difficult to admit that we were wrong, doing so may set us on the path to happiness. That’s why I like this book. It combines my interests. There’s some research that looks at what can we do to avoid subscribing to sunk-cost fallacy. One way to do that is to involve other people in our decisions. This addresses the idea of embarrassment as well. If you accept full accountability for a decision, it is much more difficult to quit. Most of us would rather keep on going until we hit a wall. How many times have we said to ourselves I was wrong ? I doubt I’ve said that more than fifty times in my life, but without a doubt I’ve been wrong more than fifty times in my life. I still don’t want to admit it—not even to myself. Involving other people early in the decision makes it easier to quit, because it feels less embarrassing."