In her book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Annie Duke shares her inspiration and recommendations to help us make better decisions.

These are some of my favorite recommendations from reading the book.

Chapter 10 Lessons from Forced Quitting

“Being forced to quit forces you to start exploring new options and opportunities. But you should start exploring before you’re forced to.”

“Even after you have found a path that you want to stick to, keep doing some exploration. Things change, and whatever you are doing now may not be the best path for you to pursue in the future. Having more options gives you something to switch to when the time is right.”

“Exploration helps you to diversify your portfolio of skills, interests, and opportunities.”

“A diversified portfolio helps to protect you against uncertainty.”

“Backup plans are good to have especially because some backup plans can turn out to be better than what we’re already pursuing.”

In her book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Annie Duke shares her inspiration and recommendations to help us make better decisions.

These are some of my favorite recommendations from reading the book.

Chapter 9 Find Someone Who Loves You but Does Not Care about Hurt Feelings

“Optimism makes you less likely to walk away while not actually increasing your chances of success. That means that being overly optimistic will make you stick to things longer that aren’t worthwhile. Better to be well calibrated.”

“Life’s too short to spend your time on opportunities that are no longer worthwhile.”

“When someone is on the outside looking in, they can usually see your situation more rationally than you can.”

“The best quitting coach is a person who loves you enough to look out for your long-term well-being. They are willing to tell you the hard truth even if it means risking hurt feelings in the short term.”

“Decisions about when to quit improve when the people who make the decisions to start things are different from the people who make the decisions to stop those things.”

“Getting the most out of a quitting coach requires permission to speak the truth.”

In her book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Annie Duke shares her inspiration and recommendations to help us make better decisions.

These are some of my favorite recommendations from reading the book.

Chapter 8 The Hardest Thing to Quit Is Who You Are: Identity and Dissonance

“When it comes to quitting, the most painful thing to quit is who you are. Our ideas, beliefs, and actions are part of our identity.”

“When new information conflicts with a belief, we experience cognitive dissonance.”

“To resolve the conflict, we can either change the belief or rationalize away the new information. Too often, we choose the latter.”

“Dissonance can also result from new information coming into conflict with our past actions.”

“We have a desire to maintain internal consistency, where our past beliefs and actions line up with our present beliefs and actions.”

“We also want others to view us as consistent. We worry that if others see inconsistency between our present and past decisions, beliefs, or actions, they will judge us as being wrong, irrational, capricious, and prone to mistakes.”

“When we know or believe our decisions are being evaluated by others, our intuition is that we will be more rational, but the opposite is true. External validity increases escalation of commitment.”

“The more extreme a position is, the more cognitive gymnastics we’ll do to defend it. The facts are more likely to persuade you away from the consensus opinion than a fringe view.”

“Fears about how others will view us if we quit are usually overblown.”

In her book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Annie Duke shares her inspiration and recommendations to help us make better decisions.

These are some of my favorite recommendations from reading the book.

Chapter 7 You Own What You’ve Bought and What You’ve Thought: Endowment and Status Quo Bias

“The endowment effect is a cognitive bias where we value something we own more than we would if we didn’t own it.”

“We can be endowed to objects but also to our own ideas and beliefs.”

“Endowment is an obstacle to quitting because when we irrationally value things we own, we miscalculate their expected value. We might think the company we started or the project we devised or the belief we have is worth more than it actually is.”

“We prefer to stick with the status quo.”

“We are more tolerant of bad outcomes that come from sticking with what we are already doing than bad outcomes that come from switching to something new. This phenomenon is part of omission-commission bias.”

When you say, “I’m just not ready to decide yet,” what you are really saying is, “For now, I am choosing the status quo.”

“Even in highly data-rich environments like professional sports, sunk cost, endowment, and status quo bias distort decision-making.”

In her book, Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, Annie Duke shares her inspiration and recommendations to help us make better decisions.

These are some of my favorite recommendations from reading the book.

Chapter 6 Monkeys and Pedestals

“Monkeys and pedestals is a mental model that helps you quit sooner.”

“Pedestals are the part of the problem you know you can already solve, like designing the perfect business card or logo. The hardest thing is training the monkey.”

“When faced with a complex, ambitious goal, (a) identify the hard thing first; (b) try to solve for that as quickly as possible; and (c) beware of false progress.”

“Building pedestals creates the illusion that you are making progress toward your goal, but doing the easy stuff is a waste of time if the hard stuff is actually impossible.”

“Tackling the monkey first gets you to no faster, limiting the time, effort, and money you sink into a project, making it easier to walk away.”

“When we butt up against a hard problem we can’t solve, we have a tendency to turn to pedestal-building rather than choosing to quit.”

“Advance planning and precommitment contracts increase the chances you will quit sooner.”

“When you enter into a course of action, create a set of kill criteria. This is a list of signals you might see in the future that would tell you it’s time to quit.”

“Kill criteria will help inoculate you against bad decision-making when you’re “in it” by limiting the number of decisions you’ll have to make once you’re already in the gains or in the losses.”

“In organizations, kill criteria allow people a different way to get rewarded beyond dogged and blind pursuit of a project until the bitter end.”

“A common, simple way to develop kill criteria is with “states and dates:” “If by (date), I have/haven’t (reached a particular state), I’ll quit.””