Knowing when to show grit and when to quit
![Knowing when to show grit and when to quit](/content/images/size/w2000/2022/10/quitting-walking-away.jpg)
Grit is viewed as a great virtue everyone should seek, while quitting is the mark of defeat and failure. Perserverance and fighting against the odds captures imagination and has a hero-like connotation to it.
Historically quitting and cowardness has always been a heinous attribute. Andrew Jackson was once called a poltroon (an aged word for a quitter) by Charles Dickinson which was grounds for a duel in which Jackson ended up murdering Dickinson. The people obviously thought this was the appropriate response: Jackson eventually became the 7th President of the United States.
Why is it so that walking away is a weakness of character? Maybe I have a unique view as a product manager where gaining experience early and pivoting to correct an unfruitful course is preached to be part of your DNA.
Thank god we have the ability to quit! Can you fathom a world in which every decision we make is a forever decision? Imagine having to continue seeing someone after a terrible first date, or having to stay in a job in which you are unhappy forever. Any decision and each day we embark on is a journey into the unknown. We simply have a massive amount of incomplete information, and it is a gift that we may change the path we walk.
Grit is a great to soldier through tough patches for things that are worthwhile
Grit is a immense attribute, but it should be used to pursue things that are worth chasing. Why do we universally view grit as one of the drivers of success? When successful people tell their success stories a pretty much guaranteed aspect they underline is their determination and grit to get where they are now. They stuck to their ideas and perservered through tough times!
These stories have a halo effect on our perception, a fallacy referred to a survivorship bias. It states that humans possess a tendency to focus on successful individuals (the survivors) and forego considering the "non-survivors", thus vastly overestimating their commoness. We are exposed to the highly visible Elon Musks and Mark Zuckerbergs of the world and don't hear the stories of the successful quitters or the one who should have quit. Just like not all founders are the Zuckerbergs-esque youngsters who ignited their spark in college (quite the contrary), always continuing out of principle is slippery slope.
Of course - you may argue - among those quitters would be a few individuals who would struck gold if they had soldiered on. And while we cannot go back in time and run an A/B test, it is most likely true. But it is beside the point. Every individual needs to decide for themselves when a goal is worth pursuing. Every decision is weighing the benefits versus the costs, and most people linger unhappily too long in situations where they refuse to quit, to admit to defeat, to become a "failure". That is the danger of grit.
Should you quit the job you are miserable in without an alternative lined up (you have bills to pay!), or perservere through until the unknown day an alternative arises? The cost-benefit analysis of the decision is unique to each individual, because people will weigh the incurred consequences differently A decision made by one person may be unthinkable for another.
The way we think reinforces are tendency to stick with things
One of the most commonly known (and something we all fall victim to) is the sunk cost fallacy. It describes the reluctance to quit a fruitless endeavor because of resources have already been heavily invested, even if there are clear signs showing that quitting is the better option.
We want to recuperate the cost of our investment - walking away ensures the finality of leaving in the red. Everyone who is an unlucky streak will know a variation of the feeling: We've had so much bad luck, surely the tables will turn if I stick with it! Everyone who has been in a casino and dabbled in gambling will attest to it. I myself once fell victim to a penny fall and lost much more money than I will admit. But hey, I fished out the $50 I wanted (that I still have today!). Let's disregard the fact that even with 50 bucks I went out of that casino with a blood red loss - but with a gambling experience at the age of 19 to last me a lifetime.
When we start something we open a mental account, and even the thought of closing this mental account with a loss is unacceptable. Even if we make a huge gain, followed by a smaller drop, we still view it as if we are in the negative. And as long as our account is open, we can still wipe out those losses! Quitting means realizing the losses, and we can't do that. Right?
Goals can lead to an escalation of commitment
Having a goal and a north star to pursue has benefits. They get you to work harder, and make you perservere - to show grit - when the going gets tough. But there is a darker side to tunnel visioning on your goals, specifically the interference of rational quitting behavior.
There are plenty of stories about marathon runners continuing with the marathon even when they broke bones midway through it. Even at the risk of them never being able to run another marathon, the inability to reach the finish line and fall short of their objective trumps any rational reasoning. These people are experiencing escalation of commitment.
What is worse: Never getting up from your armchair and training for that marathon, or training intensely for it but not managing to get to the finish line? You would feel worse in the latter scenario, but aren't you in a much better place than if you had continue to vegetate in your comfort zone? The fear of falling short paralyzes us from trying at all.
Escalation of commitment makes it so that goals slowly creep into becoming a part of your identity, which means that by quitting you are discarding part of your identity. These are the hardest missions to quit. For a large part of my life I thought Pluto was a planet. When someone presented evidence for the contrary, I was not emotionally attached to my long-held belief. I easily walked away from it, as it has no real meaning in my life. If instead someone started showcasing evidence for something that threaten my core values, my readiness for even considering changing my opinion would be very low.
Finish lines are a excruciatingly binary metric for success and failure - anything short of crossing that arbitrarily drawn line is a failure, even if it literally costs us our legs. There is no reward or pats on the back for finishing half a marathon.
Second guessing and changing course as the right way forward
When I moved to Germany I had a German tutor who, before my big first test, gave me the advice to not dwell on questions I had already answered and to go with my initial gut instinct. I found out 12 years later that the exact opposite is true. The first instinct fallacy states that revisions to an answer changes them from wrong to right more often than the other way around.
This is a lesson Product Managers learn in the trenches. There is humbleness required when admitting that a strategic pivot is necessary. Strategic decisions are predated by intense research and effort. Despite the immense planning involved, the amount of incomplete information is still staggering. And pivoting is a daunting path, because you have invested so much and are admitting that the pursued path has not bore fruit. Admitting to your peers that you are undergoing a strategic shift is not a failure, it is the essence of being lean. Every decision is a leap of faith, and walking away is a virtue.
Define an emergency brake for yourself
Who did you vote for in the last election? Have you ever thought about what it would take for you to drop your support? Psychologically, voting for a party is a huge loyalty inducing act. When someone you may have previously not agreed with becomes part of your "team", you start rationalizing and cherrypicking information to reject facts. Donald Trump and the Repulicans are the prime example of this behavior - most mainstream Republicans viciously opposed Trump before become their candidate for 2016.
What is the tipping point for when you would retract your support? What needs to happen for you to quit? An emergency brake such as this would have saved myself lots of suffering with the penny fall. Deciding for myself when to concede to the writing on the wall is a question I ask before every initiative my team pursues as a PM. But far more importantly: We must collectively rethink the entire notion of quitting. Grit is important for perservering when pursuing worthwhile things. But not every pursuit is worthwhile. We also must rethink how we view our investments. Walking away from something into which we have previously invested does not make those investments obsolete. And there is no way we can get those invested resources back in any case and mourn what is already gone.
Life is too short to stick with bad things. And wanting to liberate yourself from bad situations does not make you a failure, but a human being. And being a quitter is underrated! Winners tend to quit a lot.