sunk cost and quitting

the hardest decision skill: knowing when to keep going versus when to walk away.

the sunk cost fallacy

"i've already put so much time into this" is never a reason to continue. the only question that matters: is the next unit of effort worth it? everything you've already spent is gone regardless.

this is obvious in theory and brutally hard in practice. identity gets tangled up in commitments. quitting something you've invested in feels like admitting the investment was a mistake. but sometimes the investment was the right call at the time — and quitting is the right call now.

Annie Duke's kill criteria

the most useful framework i've found: set kill criteria before you start. decide in advance what signals would tell you to quit.

• "if we don't have X users by Y date, we stop"
• "if i'm still not enjoying this after 3 months, i move on"
• "if this approach doesn't produce results after Z iterations, we try something else"

the reason this works: deciding in a calm state is better than deciding in a state of sunk-cost-induced stubbornness. your past self was more rational about this than your current self will be.

the tension with perseverance

this page exists in direct tension with perseverance. that page says keep going when it's hard. this page says sometimes you should quit. how do you reconcile them?

my filter: is the difficulty coming from the problem being genuinely hard, or from this being the wrong problem?

• hard problem, right direction → push through (perseverance)
• hard problem, wrong direction → quit and redirect
• easy problem, no progress → something is structurally wrong. zoom out (see zooming-out)

the "monkeys and pedestals" test

from Annie Duke: if your goal is to train a monkey to juggle while standing on a pedestal, build the pedestal last. the pedestal is easy — anyone can build a pedestal. the hard part is training the monkey. if you start with the pedestal, you'll feel like you're making progress, but you haven't de-risked anything.

applied: tackle the hardest, most uncertain part first. if that part fails, quit early. don't build elaborate infrastructure around an unvalidated core assumption.

quitting projects vs quitting approaches

important distinction: quitting a project is different from quitting an approach. most of the time, you don't need to abandon the goal — you need to abandon the method. see critical-path for thinking about which parts are load-bearing.

identity and quitting

the deepest trap: when something becomes part of your identity, quitting feels like losing yourself. "i'm a person who does X" makes it nearly impossible to stop doing X, even when X isn't serving you anymore. this connects to narratives — your story about yourself can trap you in commitments that no longer make sense.

the reframe: you're not quitting who you are. you're updating your model of yourself with better information.