Knowing when to quit - an under-rated skill.

tl;dr is in the one-to-last paragraph:

“A quitter never wins and a winner never quits.” In 1937, a self-help pundit named Napoleon Hill included that phrase in his very popular book Think and Grow Rich. Hill was inspired in part by the rags-to-riches industrialist Andrew Carnegie. These days the phrase is often attributed to Vince Lombardi, the legendarily tough football coach. What a lineage! And it does make a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Of course it takes tremendous amounts of time and effort and, for lack of a more scientific word, stick-to-itiveness, to make any real progress in the world. But time and effort and even stick-to-itiveness are not in infinite supply. Remember the opportunity cost: every hour, every ounce of effort you spend here cannot be spent there. So let me counter Napoleon Hill’s phrase with another one, certainly not as well known. It’s something that Stella Adler, the great acting coach, used to say: Your choice is your talent. So choosing the right path, the right project, the right job or passion or religion — that’s where the treasure lies; that’s where the value lies. So if you realize that you’ve made a wrong choice — even if already you’ve sunk way too much cost into it — well, I’ve got one word to say to you, my friend. Quit.

Seth Godin's "The Dip" talks about this and knowing the difference between a dip and a cul-de-sac.

Unfortunately I had to quit the article about halfway through. It being a transcript of a radio broadcast made it pretty hard to follow, at least for me, but what I read was pretty fascinating, especially the part about the baseball player.

Does anyone know if there's a version of this that is formatted as a article?

From the examples, it sounds like the answer to the question "when should I quit" comes most easily when you have some source of objectivity.

It's easy, from the outside, to see a baseball minor league player in their early 30s and think "he would be better off quitting." The hard part is to accept that idea from the inside. Sometimes having a dream to be striving for is nearly as rewarding as success itself.

I listened to this over the weekend. It was entertaining, but can be summed up with "Sometimes you quit too early, sometimes you quit too late" from somewhere in the middle of the program.

Not a lot of hard data, but some interesting anecdotes.

The podcast also highlighted the importance of "failing fast," or figuring out what will or will not work as soon as possible, and adjusting accordingly. This iterative approach to finding success seems to pervade start-up culture, and in my instances, is very sound advice IMHO.

I hate the word "pivot" because it's over-abused in startup parlance, but I like it as a way to describe smart navigating -- not just in startups per say, but maybe also in the bigger game of life as well.

I think it's important to remain focused on one big long-term destination/path, but still be flexible to "quit" short-term and change directions along the way to eventually get there.

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it." -- W.C. Fields

Here is the MP3: http://audio.wnyc.org/freakonomics_specials/freakonomics_spe...