The Science of Quitting

Published Nov 1, 2021, 7:01 AM

Annie Duke believes we should be quitting things more often, a skill she honed during her lucrative years as a professional poker player on the world stage. Annie talks about the science of quitting, and shows us how to get out of our own way and learn to quit when we should.

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Pushkin. What I found out is that, like there's all these like great words for grit, including like heroism, right like steadfast, right like perseverance, Like grit is one of those words that's like a super super positive connotation, like sticktuitiveness, But when you look at quit, there's hardly any words that like are nice. And in fact, one of the synonyms for quit is the word coward. Annie Duke knows a lot about quitting. It's something she got really good at when she was a professional poker player on the world stage, and a successful one at that. We're talking over four million dollars in prize money. And what distinguishes great poker players from everybody else is that is mainly quitting. They quit a lot more. So they're just very good at cutting their losses, so they fold more hands to start. Once they've committed money to a pot, they fold a lot more. They change tactics or strategies like in the middle of things, and you have to be willing to do that. Annie's rallying cry is that we should quit a lot more. I know it's not something we hear often, and that's exactly why I've been so excited to have Annie on this show to teach us something that goes against common wisdom but can actually change our lives for the better. Annie's the best selling author of two books, Thinking in Bets and How to Decide. But today she's going to give us a sneak peek of her upcoming book on the science of Quitting. She'll show us how to get out of her own way and learn how to quit when we should. I'm Maya Shunker, and this is a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change. Poker wasn't always in the cards for Annie. She actually started out at the University of Pennsylvania studying cognitive science, specifically how we make decisions and times of uncertainty. I was fully intending to become a professor, which is kind of what you do with that kind of degree. It doesn't have a whole lot of practical application. And I actually had all of my what are called job talks lined up, and I've been struggling for a couple of months with a stomach problem, and I thought I'm just going to power through this, and it turned out that my body said no, you can't power through it. And in fact, the powering through it meant that I ended up in the hospital because I sort of wasn't taking care of this problem. And so I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks, very sick. So I decided to take a year off to try to recuperate. And there was a little bit of a bind, right, because so I've been forced to quit for a year, and I can't I don't want to start a new career because I'm going to go back and become an academic and I don't know how I'm going to feel from day today. So I need something that has like super flexible hours. And I really desperately need money, because it turns out when you leave graduate school for a year, your fellowship does not leave with you. You yeah, yeah, So I did not have any money. So my brother actually suggested to me that I could play poker and that that might be like the perfect thing for me to do because obviously I could set my own hours, and you know, I could just do it to make some money on the side. And you know what, I just I sat down at the table and it was like, you know, when like in the movies, I'll have like the heavens open up and the angels are singing. It felt a little bit like that to me, because when I thought about what I had been studying a graduate school, this was that, in other words, this problem of how do you make really great decisions under uncertainty, and poker is like super uncertain you can't see the other players cards, and in the short run there's a really really strong influence of luck, which makes the decision making problem really hard, and it's really high stakes in real time. And sort of from the moment I sat down at the table, it turned out I had a knack for it. So I didn't actually end up going back to graduate school because I loved this so much and I was experiencing a lot of success. Within a couple of years, I'd played at the World Series of Poker, I was making final tables, I cashed in the main event, ended up moving to Las Vegas, And this is what I really concentrated on for quite a while. And then in two thousand and two there was a new aaha, which was that there was this amazing conversation to be had between cognitive science and poker, a poker sort of informing the cognitive science and the cognitive science informing the poker. So I started consulting and speaking full time and really wanted to write a book about these topics that I had really been exploring. So it looks like I've changed careers a lot, you know, from academic to poker player to speaker and consultant to author back to academic. It seems like a lot of zigging and zagging. But there's this through line through everything, which is learning under uncertainty. Yeah, so quitting gets such a bad rep right, And you know, one of the things that I loved learning from you is that it's evident, even in the English language, that we are biased against quitting. Can you share more about that? Sure? So you have hero as a synonym, like heroism is a synonym for grittiness, and then cowardice as a synonym for quitting. And also, just by the way, one of the things I point out is we have this word grittiness, but we don't have a word quittiness, which is telling in and of itself. Right. So obviously there are some negative ways to describe being too gritty, like stubbornness or rigidity, but they're few and far between. Mostly they're like amazing, like, oh, you're such a hero, You're so gritty, you're perseverance, stick, tuitiveness, pluck, you're very plucky, right of metal. And then on the quitside, it's just like you're a coward, right, you're capricious, like all of these things. So I think that it's really reflected in the English language, and then it's kind of reflected in if you think about the way that we process a narrative, right, we don't really see the quitters. Like what we think about is the people the heroes are the ones who persevere beyond the point of physical or emotional or mental well being in order to push past that and like cross the chasm. But the problem, of course, is that a lot of times those people have put themselves in danger in a situation where you really ought to have turned around. And what I think is really interesting, and I talk about this in the book, is that from a narrative standpoint, we'd prefer somebody to push past the point of sensibility and persevere and actually perish to somebody who rightly quits early, Like, which do you think of is the more admirable person? So one of the examples, like I've given the book is if you think about Everest, right when we think about somebody like Rob Hall. So for those people who don't know, like if you've read the book Into Thin Air or you've seen the documentary Everest, this was in nineteen ninety six and there was a it was a disastrous year where a lot of people died on the mountain on Everest, and Rob Hall, who was this amazing alpinist and expedition leader, was one of those people who perished, and he is very much painted as a hero of that story. He had set turnaround times for every single day, and a turnaround time is just if you haven't gotten to point A by this time, you must turn around and go back to whatever camp you're coming from. The reason being that there's a very very dangerous part of that mountain called the South Ridge, and you do not want to descend the South Ridge in darkness. You'll fall like eight thousand feet into Nepal. And Rob Hall broke the turnaround time, so you know, and obviously it resulted in tragedy. And what's really interesting is that there were some people who followed the turnaround time who are also described in the book. They're also in the documentary, and nobody remembers their names, just so you know, it's such in Santaski and Kaciki, these are three people who turned around at the right time and made these great decisions, and they're totally invisible to us because they aren't the heroes of our narratives. And that's part of the problem, Like how do you people like that to be the hero of your narrative? Yeah? Yeah, can you also just close the loot for listeners on Rob Hall, So just noting that the reason he did not follow the turnaround time he was trying to help this guy get up who had previously not been able to get up, And do you mind just sharing that because I think that's such an emotionally evocative part of the story, which is like we can't quit a second time, you know. Yeah? Yeah, So Rob Paul actually got to the top, but then he waited there for two hours for a guy named Doug Hanson. And the question is why, right, like why why he was already an hour passed the turnaround time. Doug Hanson clearly was well passed the turnaround time and was not nearly as skill the climber as Rob Hall was, so why didn't he turn around? And you have to rewind to the year before to understand kind of what the forces were that caused him to do that. So the year before was a very bad climbing year. So Rob Hall had tried to sum up with a group and Doug Hanson was in the group and they came back down, so they had abandoned their summit attempt. So now he convinces Doug Hanson to come back the next year because he says, I'll get you up the second time. And now we can see these forces like this is one of the big forces that causes us to not quit. And the phrase that I think is such a great phrase for us to really internalize it is called in the losses. So when we're in the losses, we have the desire to get those back, and we don't think about, well, what's the probability that I would actually be able to succeed? That's number one. We don't think about if I go for this, what are the opportunities I'm going to give up by going for it? Right, And that's true of anything like if you're in an monogamous relationship, you're obviously foregoing the opportunities to date other people. If you're in a job, you're foregoing the other opportunities to have other full time jobs. So this is a really actually big problem is that we tend not to see what we're giving up in terms of the other opportunities that might be available to us when we're on a particular path. So if you think about climbing Everest when we're thinking about trying to reach the summit, it causes this like myopia where we can't see, like other things, other opportunities that we might have in our life, like to climb other mountains, or to spend time with our families or whatever it else it is we might want to do that that pursuing that goal might actually make less likely for us to be able to do exactly. Okay, so Annie, I'd love to dig into some of the behavioral biases we face that interfere with our ability to quit when we ought to. Do you mind talking with listeners about escalation of commitment? Sure? Have you ever heard of the game Katamari? So Katamari is a game where it's the weirdest game. You start with this little tiny speck of something and you roll it around and it starts to pick stuff up, and if it picks things up that are smaller than it is, it will pick it up and it will grow in size. If you try to pick something up that's bigger than the ball that you're rolling around, it will cause the ball to become smaller again. So the idea is you're trying to create a ball that's big enough that you can start picking up planets and it becomes like the size of a sun. So you start off with this little ball that's like picking up specs of dust and flies, and you're rolling it around like in a room, and you're like, then you start picking up bottles, you pick up the cat, you know, you pick up like the couch, and then you start picking up houses, and you can pick up mountains, and this thing just becomes bigger and bigger and bigger. And when I think about what happens to us that we don't quit, I think about Cotamuri because I think that it's such a great visual for understanding escalation of commitment. And it basically goes this way. You put time, resources, money, your own identity, right like, if you think about a career or a major, it becomes part of your identity. Who am I? I'm a doctor? Who am I? You know? I am an English major or I'm an engineer or whatever. Right, these things become part of our identity, and then we're putting time and effort and money and all of this stuff resources into this thing. Those The fact that we've dumped all of that into the decision to be on the path that we're on means that when we're faced with a decision about whether to quit or persevere, we're going to have a tendency to persevere because we've accumulated all of this debris like a catamari ball. But what's interesting is that the fact that that pushes us to persevere means that now we persevere, and now we put more time and more effort and more money and more resources and more of our identity into the thing that we're doing, which means that the next point that we're thinking about whether to quit or persevere, the ball is bigger. It's starting to become house sized, which makes us then more likely to persevere again, and so on and so forth, until you have like this katamari that's the size of a planet, and you kind of can't quit at that point. So now if we go back to Rob Hall, we can see the problem, right, because he's carrying a lot of that with him. He failed the year before. He's made a promise to Doug Hanson and that he's going to get him up, and that causes this myopia for him to sort of, I think, not to see the situation for what it is, which is one that you should quit, go back down the mountain, grab Doug Hanson and then you know, maybe you have a chance the next year. I'm wondering Annie if you can talk a bit about the role of regret and all this, because there is a regret asymmetry that's important to acknowledge here, which is, we tend to feel a lot of regret when we think about the idea of quitting, but somehow staying with the status quo does not fill us with those same feelings of regret. And so can you just talk to listeners a bit about regret asymmetry generally and how that plays a profound role in our conception of quitting. Right, it's an antagonist towards quitting. Yeah, so there's two really important biases to think about because they collide here when it comes to quitting. The first cognitive bias is called status quo bias. Status quo bias is that we have a preference for the path that we're already on. Okay, so we don't like to change. We have a preference to keep going the way that we're going. That collides with another bias, which is called omission comission bias, and what that is is that failing to act does not feel as much like a decision as acting does. Right, So let's say that I'm in a career or I'm in a relationship and I just stay the path. It doesn't feel like I've made a decision. If I move, If I quit my job and change, if I break up in the relationship, now it feels like I've actually made a decision. Now. The reason why this is an error is because the decision to stay in the job is also an active decision, and you should treat it the same way like our regret treats those two things differently. Okay, so let's say that you're in a job that is just awful. I have had conversations with people quite often where this happens. They come to me and they say, I really hate my job. I'm trying to decide whether I should quit. I don't really know what I should do, and I ask them this question. Imagine it's a year from now and you're still in the job that you're in. Do you think you'll be happy? And they say no. So what they're telling me is that one hundred percent of the time, twelve months from now, I will be unhappy in the job that I'm in. So now I say to them, Okay, let's say that you quit this job and you go get this other job that you're thinking about. Imagine it's a year from now, do you think you'll be happy? And they'll say, well, some of the time, you know, they'll say, let's just say they say it's a fifty fifty chance. Okay, So they say, if I switch fifty percent of the time, I'll be happy, fifty percent of the time I won't. Now, when I put it that way, it becomes obvious that you ought to quit because one path you're unhappy one hundred percent of the time, and another path you're unhappy fifty percent of the time. So it seems clear that you ought to go take the other job. But this is where the regret asymmetry comes in. Which is like, we're very tolerant of the unhappiness that occurs and just staying the course, and we're very intolerant of the unhappiness that might occur if we switch, and that they'll actually express that out loud. They'll say, but what if I take the new job and I'm unhappy, I'll feel like such an idiot versus staying the job that I know I hate and I already know have evidence I'm unhappy in Yeah. Right, we'll be back in a moment with a slight change of plans, when Annie will share scientific strategies you can use to quit more often and sooner. One of the things that you said before that really struck me is around this concept of identity. And the reason is that so much of a slight change of plans is about our identity, how fixed we can feel in our sense of identity in the face of a big change, and how it is that we can navigate that. And one of the things you alluded to is we can sometimes resist quitting even when we know we ought to, because we attach that pursuit so closely to our identity, or we take so much pride in our identity as good decision makers. We don't like the idea of having it revealed to us that maybe we didn't actually make a great decision in the first place when we decided to do X or Y. And I'm wondering if you have tips for listeners about how it is that we can disentangle our sense of identity from these kinds of decisions or from the attachment we have towards certain pursuits, so that we can make clearer choices, more rational choices at these inflection points. So you talked about like, it's really hard for us to imagine that we made a bad decision, so we won't give it up. But I also want to add in there, sometimes we made a perfectly good decision but the circumstances have changed. But in that situation, we don't want to give up because somehow we think it invalidates the decision that we made in the first place, which isn't true. Remember, we're making decisions under uncertainty, and I think that's part of the problem is we forget that there's a third possibility, which is you made a perfectly fine decision and then you found out new stuff. And that's also by the true in relationships, like, given what you knew at the time, it seems like a really good match, and then you found out new stuff like that person might have changed. I think that's incredibly important for people to understand, is that sometimes stuff just changes. It's okay. Doesn't mean that you that you messed up in the first place, and and most of the time you didn't mess up in the first place. Mike, If you put a sign on your lawn for a candidate and then the candidate gets involved in some scandal, it doesn't mean it was like it was a bad decision for you to vote for them in the first place because you didn't know. Yeah, And I love the thought experiment that you give, which I think elucidates this concept well, which is when you ask people what's the best decision you've ever made? What's the worst decision you've ever made? We tend to not focus on the process by which we made the decision or the inputs to that decision, but instead what the outcome was. So what you found is you asked people what was the best decision, Well, they tend to choose the thing that had the best outcome, and vice versa for the bad one, and it's very possible. Like you said that, let's say you made actually a really crappy decision, but you just lucked out, right, like chance worked in your favor and new information appeared or whatnot, and you ended up with a good outcome. But I think that is a really helpful thought experiment, because to your point, you might have very well made the decision to take on a pursuit or support a certain candidate, and it was a very smart choice given all the information you had had at that moment, or or by the way your own preferences can change. I just want to, like, I want to make that really clear. Like I know, for me, like the things that I thought that I wanted for myself in my twenties are like very different than the things that I wanted for myself in my thirties. Yeah. So what's interesting there is that if somebody else were to look at the path you're on, Like if somebody else were to look at the decision about whether you should sell that stock or the decision about whether you should change careers, they'll often see that more clearly than you because they're not endowed to it. If you have somebody else looking at the decision. They don't have this, they don't have the dissonance. They don't. They don't. They're not worried about squaring your past actions with your future actions or your present actions. They're just worried about whether it's sort of the best decision for you going forward. So you can see that getting somebody else to look at the decision and help you with it is actually going to be really helpful. So, as the amazing Daniel Kneman No About laureate said to me, you should find someone who loves you but doesn't care about your feelings. I love that. Just like, present the situation to somebody else in an objective way and have them help you. So, like, in the simplest sense, if you're thinking about changing jobs and you're really struggling with that for all of these reasons and the whole Katamari right, like that all of that debris that you're accumulating when you're thinking about changing careers after like you know, fifteen years and training in college and all of this stuff, have someone else help you with the decision. They'll probably see it more clearly than you do. So that's like trick number one. Trick number two is to set the circumstances under which you might quit in advance of you having accumulated any of that debris when the Katamari is just really tiny and it's not planet sized yet, right, So if we can do that when it's tiny and we haven't actually accumulated all of that stuff, then when it comes time to quitting, will be better at it. So let me give you a really good example of designing in advance turnaround times. So remember our intrepid climbers on Everest who turned around at one pm. Now, notice those three climbers did, but a lot of other people did it. So this is not perfect. Right, It's not going to work one hundred percent of the time, But if they didn't have those turnaround time, those three people would not have turned around. So it works some of the time and some of the time, last time I checked, is better than none of the time. So one of the things that we want to do when we go in, whether it's a relationship or a job or anything, is we want to sort of think before we enter into it, what are the things that could be occurring that would cause me to want to quit. Here another tactic, another strategy we can use to quit closer to when we should is to increase the flexibility and how we set goals, right, we tend to think about the world in binaries. Right, you got to the top of Mount Everest, or you didn't get to the time completely fail exactly, even though you may have gotten seven eighths of the way there. And I think this is compounded by what's called the goal gradient effect, which says that we see increases in our motivational levels the closer we are to reaching our goal. Right, So in that seven eighth stretch of the mountain, right, our will, our desire is is amplified in ways that can be very counterproductive. So can you talk a bit more about how listeners can set I guess what I would call more reasonable goals so that we don't find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. Yeah, so okay, So there's this amazing work by Maurice Schweitzer who's at Wharton at University of Pennsylvania, who he's really talked about. You know, I think that we have this idea that goals are just generally good, like as a universal right. Like there's all this literature on goal setting as a motive, national force and He's coming at it from the other side. He's saying, there's a real downside to coals, which is exactly what you talked about, which is, when you have a goal, it does two things to you. One is it necessarily privileges certain values that you might have and de privileges other values that you might have. So super simple, if you're going for Everest, you're privileging that goal, right, like I want to get to Everest, But what are you deprivileging comfort? You're deprivileging time with your family because it takes months to do it away from your family, right, so and so forth. So you can see that whatever we're doing, you know, if we're spending time trying to do that last stretch of a project, we're deprivileging other goals that we might have, like spending time with our family or watching ted Lasso or cook taking a cooking class or whatever it is. So I think that we need to be very thoughtful about if when I think about this goal, first of all, what am I not seeing and what am I giving up that I'm following this goal? And then we also collide that with goals or also past fail So in a lot of ways. It's better to have never tried to go up Everest at all than to have gotten with them three hundred feet of the summit and turned around. So that's also a problem. Yeah, all right, So how do we solve for this. There's kind of two ways that we solve for it. So the first way that we can do is to remember the word unless. And this is really important and it goes back to this idea that I was talking about before, of think about these things in advance. Right, So it's totally fine to say this is my goal unless right. So my goal is to reach the summit unless there's really bad weather or it's past one pm. So this idea of this is my goal unless allows you to say I am set in this goal given what my information is right now. The second thing I think so I was speaking to Ken Kamler, who it's really amazing. He had been a doctor on Everest actually six different times, and he said something I think that was really profound. He said, people forget when they're climbing Everest that the goal of Everest is not to get to the summit. The goal is to get back down to the base of the mountain. And why I think that that's so powerful is that he's talking about a time horizon. Problem is that we get really wrapped up in the short term a loot, when we ought to be thinking about the long term what is going to make us happy? Like if you're going to set a goal, you should think about a long term goal, like what is your goal over the course of your life, and in the shortest form that should be like to maximize your happiness. So as you're staying in an incredibly miserable career because you've put so much time into it and so much effort, and you don't want all of that to go to waste, and you don't want all the training to go to waste, and you're worried that what does it mean if you quit for who you are because you're an engineer or you're whatever, And then what will you be if you quit? And what will other people think about you? Won't they judge you for quitting? And all of that stuff that creates that planet sized katamari that stops us from quitting. When you're caught up in that all of that stuff is weighing so heavily on you, it makes it really really hard to leave. But you're miserable. And if you think about the long term goal of what in the end, as I look back on my life is going to have made me happy. I think that when you can get to that more long term thinking, you'll realize that grinding it out in a horrible career with a boss who is a nightmare in a toxic work environment is not in the long run, going to make you really happy. So, for our listeners who are anxiety around quitting, right, I'm wondering, it's not a full proof plant. Right. I'm sure there have been things that you may have regretted quitting at some point in your life. But the upside is that you probably learned something valuable about your own decision making process and how to improve that decision making process around quitting. So do you mind just sharing any regret you have about something you quit? But what you learn from that experience, you know? So the funny thing is so, so I actually I actually regret quitting academics in the first place. Part of what made me not go back to academics earlier was because I thought that all the people that I had studied with would be mad at me, including my amazing advisor and I thought, oh, she must you know, I just had it in my head that she must be so mad at me for quitting. And we reconnected ten years ago and she was so the opposite of mad at me. And that is a lesson that everybody needs to learn. It's like, whatever you think think that other people are thinking about you, it's probably not what they're actually thinking. And I stopped myself from I deprived myself of a really important relationship in my life and the ability to actually be doing academics at the same time as I was doing something else that I loved in a much fuller way because I got caught up thinking about how other people might judge me. And I think that's a lot of what stops us from quitting. And when I came back to academics, everybody welcomed me with open arms, and it was all living in my head. And so I would say, that's like the biggest lesson for me. I love that so much. Yeah, And you know, to your point, I think so much of your research and this upcoming book of yours is about how we rehabilitate quitting. And I think as a society, the way that we can change cultural norms around quitting is to recognize the compassion people will show us in the face of quitting and the lack of judgment that you know that we think is going to exist in our heads, as you mentioned, but doesn't necessarily need to be the case. And I think that when you approach things is either or it becomes it puts a lot of extra pressure on you that you're closing the door to something. And when I talk to people who, for example, are about are thinking about like changing careers and they're really having a hard time with it, one of the things that I always ask them is can you go back to the other career if this doesn't work out? And they'll normally say yes, there's no reason why they can't, and that seems to free them up to make the change. And I think that we have a tendency to think of decisions is last and final, and in poker, you definitely can't think about it that way. That's that's one of the things that poker trained me to do, is to realize decisions are not last and final, and you can always change course mid stream, and you can often get back to choices that you rejected. And if we realize that more. I think that we would be more exploratory, and it would it would make our outcomes better. Actually join me next week when we'll hear from John Elder robeson he underwent experimental brain stimulation to deepen his emotional intelligence. And I'm walking through the mall and I'm just like looking around at the people and it was not beauty and sweetness and light. It was like fear and anxiety and worry and jealousy and all these things that they are all coming at me from a million different directions, and there was nothing I could do. A Slight Change of Plans is created written an executive produced by me Maya Shunker. The best part of creating this show is getting to collaborate with my formidable Slight Change family. This includes Tyler Green, our senior producer, Jen Guera, our senior editor, Then Holiday, our sound engineer, Emily Rosteck our associate producer, and Neil Lavelle, our executive producer. Louise Scara wrote our delightful theme song, and Ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee. You can follow a slight change of plans on Instagram at doctor Maya Shunker and please remember to subscribe, share, and rate the show to help get the word out. See you next week now. I just want to set this stage for people, because this was in the nineties. Poker was not on TV, and pretty much every discussion I had with people where they said what are you doing right now and I said, well, employed poker usually well, the first thing that would ask is is your husband rich? Which you know this within the nineties, it's like, wow, that's super sexist. But then once they sort of figured out no, like I was actually supporting supporting us with this endeavor, they would usually ask if I had gone to gamblers Anonymous

A Slight Change of Plans

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