Should I quit?
The hard decision to grit or quit. We turn to Annie Duke for advice on when to walk away from a creative project.
Hey there and welcome to your midweek update!
Today, we’re clearing some extra space because we’ve got a biggie. If you’re tempted to bail out now, I get it. But trust me, sticking around will be worth your while.
Here’s the question we’re wrestling with, brought to us by a friend of Breakthroughs & Blocks: “Should I set aside my novel-writing dreams to focus on a non-fiction book that could boost my business and pay the bills?”
OK, full confession, it’s not a friend, but me Bec, juggling too many priorities with not enough time and energy to do justice to them all. I’m in the trickiest stage that author Elizabeth Gilbert once wrote about:
“It seems obvious that there comes period in your life when you have to learn to say no to things you don't want to do. But the biggest trickiest lesson in holding on the stalwart commitment to your creativity is learning how to say no to the things you do want to do.” Elizabeth Gilbert
I really want to write this novel, but is it time to say no to fiction? Should I quit? I turned to Annie Duke’s book Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away for answers.
Grit or quit?
We live in a society that celebrates grit. But, as Duke writes, the opposite of a great virtue is also a virtue.1 She says the funny thing about grit, is that:
“While grit can get you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, grit can also get you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile. The trick is in figuring out the difference.” Annie Duke
As someone who is Team Grit, perseverance and persistence are my core skills. I’m a completer finisher. But the resilience that helps me finish hard things also means I keep going with things I should probably abandon. Grit is my superpower and my nemesis.
A bias against quitting
There are multiple cognitive biases that blind us to the value of quitting. Take loss aversion, where the emotional impact of a loss (such as giving up on a lifelong dream to write a novel) is greater than the impact of an equivalent gain (having time to write my non-fiction book).
The problem when deciding whether to persist with a creative project is that the only way to know absolutely whether it will succeed is to continue with it. We don’t have data on the projects we quit, they are hidden, out of sight and mind. All we have are what-ifs, hypotheticals and counterfactuals.2
What Duke sets out to do in her book, and in her work as a decision-making consultant, is give us tools to decide whether and when to quit. In addition to rock-solid research, her advice is shared through compelling stories across all aspects of life from business to sport and creativity.
5 Tips on how to quit from Annie Duke
Here are a few ideas that struck me and I hope you find helpful. That doesn’t make them easy! Some of this advice is challenging, particularly the first one which goes against so much advice on getting started.
1. Do the hardest thing first
I spend a lot of time helping people to break down goals into small achievable steps. Research backs this up - starting small is a sure way to beat perfection, build a habit, and shift from doing nothing to making progress.
Duke doesn’t disagree, but gets us to switch perspective from starting to finishing. She shares examples of large engineering works and businesses that end up costing more because they made rapid progress on the small easy jobs rather than seeing if they could do the hard part. Because of ‘sunk costs’, once we begin investing time (and/or money) in a project we’re more likely to doggedly continue, even when the costs of keeping going escalate or finishing becomes impossible. Doing the hardest thing first means you figure out whether it’s worth your time.3
2. Find your kill criteria
Because we hate abandoning projects once they’re underway4 we need reasons to decide, ideally set in advance.
Duke calls these ‘kill criteria’ literally, a set of criteria for ‘killing’ a project. She advises: “Ask yourself, ‘What are the signs that if I see them in the future, will cause me to exit the road I’m on?’”
These signs are your kill criteria and become one of the best tools for figuring out when to quit.
Read: How to savour your progress
3. Enlist a quitting coach
We make poor decisions when it comes to things we hold dear, such as aspects of our identity or our deeply held values. This tendency is especially pronounced for those of us who lean towards optimism, adopting a Pollyanna-like outlook (*hands up*). Research shows that while being optimistic makes us more determined to stick with hard things, for longer (yay!), it does not increase our chance of success (boo).
Duke suggests we enlist a quitting coach who can assess our situation more rationally. The best quitting coach is someone who loves you enough to look out for your long-term well-being yet willing to tell you the hard truth even if it means hurting your feelings in the short term. While I love my friends to cheer me on I also need ones who call me out.
4. Add ‘unless’ to a goal
Goals are amazing motivators - simply having one in place will increase commitment and help us accomplish more than we thought possible. Therein lies their fault.
I’ve been using this tip every single day in my own writing and with coaching clients. It reminds me of Professor Gabrielle Oettingen’s WOOP where any plan addresses obstacles. For my writing this looks like: I will write every morning at 8am unless I have a client call.
Your ‘unless’ might be work, family commitments, health. Acknowledging what gets in the way and making it part of the goal has transformed how I feel about progress. In short, it gave me permission to be kind to myself when I can’t meet my plan.
Read more on WOOP: Does dreaming big work? The upsides and downsides of positive thinking
5. Imagine the future
Time travel a year ahead to check whether things will change. The examples given for this were mostly workplace-based, something we can all relate to, being stuck in a job waiting for a pay rise or for our rubbish boss to leave. Are you OK with the situation for another 12-months?
This thought experiment helps you confront the reality and question whether you’re prepared to stick with it. Grit and quit are two sides of the same decision so sticking with the status quo is an active decision to not quit.
Do you quit? How? I’d love to hear
If it feels like we are quitting too early, Duke says that it’s probably the right time. Most of us are not used to quitting, it feels kind of wrong. Our own feelings are not the best guide as they’re subject to all sorts of societal pressures and psychological biases. Anything that gives us perspective will help.
Tell me what tools you use. Do you have a friend that calls time on your sunk ideas or have you honed your intuition to act on inklings and walk away?
Finally, did reading this post make you feel as uncomfortable as it did for me to write? Wish me luck as I consider my commitment to writing my novel. Send kill criteria!
Cheers, Bec
A few links
We’ve resurrected our 7-Day Writing Sprint. Starting 8 April, you can read more and sign up here: Can you help us? Volunteer to test our 7-Day Writing Sprint on Substack
We’ve also opened the waitlist for our next Writing RESET course
Bec is teaching a residential writing week at Arvon next month, find out more: Life Writing with Coaching: Unlock the power of your personal story
We’re supporting The London Writers’ Salon in a very exciting event next month. More to come, but check out their website, sign up to their newsletter or follow on the socials. And go to a Writers’ Hour if you need some accountability now!
Proud to be a partner for the SI Leeds Literary Prize - a biennial prize for unpublished fiction by UK Black and Asian women. Entries open 1 April 2024.
If you are a short story writer and inspired by the theme of People and Artificial Intelligence, check out The Surrey New Writing Prize. Deadline 18 April 2024.
Finally, Bec read Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport - you can check out what she thought over on Instagram or LinkedIn. Let us know if you’d like us to share more recommended reads here.
Time to update the thesaurus, if you look for the antonym of ‘grit’ the top matches are ‘weakness’ and ‘cowardice’, where the synonyms are everything from the practical ‘perseverance’ to the poetic ‘moxie’, ‘spirited’ and ‘spunk’.
Paging Daniel H. Pink and his book The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward
Duke tells a wonderful story about Captain of Moonshots, Astro Teller who heads up Google’s innovation arm, called X. Teller’s approach to deciding whether to continue with a project is called ‘monkeys and pedestals’. Imagine you have an idea to train monkeys to juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal - you’d be on to a winner. Teller says there are two aspects to this, build a pedestal and train the monkey. Pedestals are easy, but training monkeys to juggle flaming torches is near on impossible. Can you do the hard thing and train the monkey?
Research actually shows we become more determined to continue!
I know this is a controversial one! I found it challenging to write. My inclination is to keep going and to encourage people to stick to their projects. But that is why it is so important for us to sometimes stop and consider what is best, for us, for our creativity for the long term. I'd love to hear what you think.
Thank you for this! Have been wrestling with this question w/ my non-fiction book project that I can't seem to finish. At a few moments along the way, I thought — maybe I should cut my losses and move on to something else? And each time I decided to soldier on with it instead . . . and to be honest I'm not sure if that was the right call.