Grit or Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Move On
Takeaways
Explore the fine line between perseverance and quitting. Learn when to push through and when stepping back is the key to success.
As I was growing up, I remember hearing the chant “quitters never prosper”. It was a taunt my friends and I would utter with reverence as if it was wisdom handed down from the gods. Anytime someone suffered a mild concussion in dodgeball or a hairline fracture in a bike crash, we felt it was our duty to shame them into continuing to play lest they devolve into a slothful version of a human.
And even though I don’t think my parents ever uttered the words, they didn’t need to. They were both paragons of grit. White-knuckling their career choice to the bitter end no matter what misery it induced. They are somewhat baffled by the younger generation's steady flow of job change and career fluidity, with the average person now holding 12 jobs during their lifetime.
I believe we are seeing a very positive shift in our collective thinking that it is sometimes healthy and needed to walk away from a job, a deal, a relationship, a purchase, a product, or a decision. But I didn’t always think this way. I once thought this was pretty black and white. If you quit on something then you are a “quitter” and we all know that “quitters” are doomed to a perpetual loop of giving up easily on everything. That has been so driven into our collective consciousness that there is a degree of shame at just considering the thought of walking away from something.
There is a debate going on right now on the importance of “grit” versus the merits of “quit”. There are two great reads on this: Angela Duckworth’s “Grit” extolling the virtues of perseverance while Annie Duke in “Quit” gives practical advice on when folding is the better option.
We live in an era with buzzwords like “quiet quitting” and the “great resignation”. It is as if the spirit of quitting is in the air and at times a bit celebrated. While some bemoan these trends as if the moral fabric of our society is unraveling, much of it is people realizing that they don’t want to spend any more of their lives in a toxic work culture, or with a team they are not compatible with or in a job that does not provide for any sense of purpose or meaning. Is that really a bad thing?
The more I let my deeply engrained “grit” bias be influenced by the merits of quitting, I can see that it is the better choice at times. Annie Duke points out that the difference between professional poker players and amateurs is the staggering difference between how often professionals “quit” a hand (75 -85% of the time) while amateurs play over 50% of their hands. The pros do a lot of quitting.
It is the same with business deals and why we set stop losses on stock trades, right? The pros know when to walk away from a deal or to cut their losses on a stock and it is the amateurs that tend to stay in too long. I was advising a client who was being eaten alive by interest rate hikes on their real estate that was purchased on a floating rate because their strategy was to sell it after holding it a short time. But as they got deeper into ownership, they had a hard time sticking with their strategy and got caught holding onto a property for far too long. They held onto grit when they would have been so much better off with quitting.
In my days as a mountaineer, I would always set a “turnaround time” and share it with the whole team. If we were still pushing for the summit at 3:00 p.m. and that was our turnaround time, it didn’t matter where we were on the mountain, we were all mutually accountable to starting our way back down to safety. Without it, “summit fever” would blind us to the probability that forging ahead would mean spending the night high on the slopes of a frigid peak without proper equipment.
Grit and perseverance help you stick to hard things that are worthwhile. Our problem is that we tend to have a bias to stick to things that are not worthwhile. We have a bias against quitting because we have been taught that quitting is somehow bad. The truth is that it is often the smart thing to do.
As a leader, what are you setting in place to help you not get caught up in blindly following the doctrine of “grit” just for the sake of patting yourself on the back for being “gritty”?
Here are a few options and tactics that I find helpful.
Turnaround Times – It is usually much easier to establish a point that quitting is the better outcome at the start of a project, just like on a climb it is easier to set a turnaround time when you are at base camp, rather than making that decision on the summit ridge. It may be a turnaround point for your child to drop an extracurricular activity when their grade dips to a C, or to back out of a deal when the projected profits dip below a pre-determined level.
Not-To-Do List - I am a list guy. I admit it. I’m a sucker for a good to-do list. But sometimes I need to create a not-to-do list. Our lives get cluttered with activities and commitments that others wish us to do that are simply not in our own best interest. Everything that we have said “yes” to is keeping us from doing something else. Sometimes the truth is that we need to quit some good things so that we can do the best things. Be ruthless about it.
Quitting Coach – Talking to a trusted friend or advisor who is not in it with you but can see the situation clearly, may be helpful. For those in leadership roles, this is where an executive coach can be worth their weight in gold. A coach can ask you clear-headed questions about what is not working in your current situation and what will be different in your new direction. Sometimes our bias against quitting masks the stark truth about how unhappy we are in our current roles and that the prospects of this changing, if we stay, are bleak at best, while switching usually affords a greater likelihood of happiness. Without a coach nudging us, many of us will tell ourselves to march on in misery. A leadership coach can help you not waste any more time. If you are invited by someone else to help them think through a grit or quit decision, get them thinking less about quitting and more about switching. If your kid wants to quit playing an instrument, or a sport, don’t make them keep doing the thing they hate, but do ask them what they are going to switch to. Be careful about what you are gritty about.
Monkeys before Pedestals – Annie Duke in Quit talks about how essential it is to think through projects in such a way that we tackle deliverables in their order of difficulty to make it easier to quit something before we have too much committed to the project. Astro Teller at Google X uses the metaphor that if you wanted to make money by training a monkey to juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal in the middle of the town square, it is important to not build the pedestal first. Why? The bottleneck is seeing if you can train the monkey to juggle. That is the hard part and too often we start by doing the easy thing, even if it is capital intensive, and then we find out that the monkey can’t juggle but we end up feeling like we can’t quit because we are too invested after building a nice pedestal.
Embrace The Dip, Abandon the Cul-De-Sac - In the book, The Dip, Seth Godin does a masterful job of defining the struggle that exists to accomplish worthwhile objectives - he calls it “the dip”. The dip is actually what makes successful people stand out as few people are willing to push through the challenges of the dip. If there wasn’t a dip that required perseverance to get through, everyone would be a star athlete, platinum recording artist, and a titan of industry. But the dip does exist and acts like a moat keeping those out without the grit to cross to the other side. We can only cross so many dips in our lifetime. Deciding if what you are facing is a dip worth fighting through or another cul-de-sac leading to a dead end is the big quandary.
It looks like we had it wrong as kids. While grit is important to help us stay engaged with things that really matter, knowing when to quit is essential to success. Maybe quitters are the ones who are most likely to prosper after all.
