Just Don't Do It: The Hidden Virtues of Quitting

Why we should do it more.

Photo by Jason Mavrommatis on Unsplash

In 2016, Alex Honnold wanted to climb the most famous rock in the world, Yosemite's El Capitan. He planned to do it without any ropes or assistance whatsoever. If he fell, he would die. One of his friends invested serious time and money into forging a film crew and making a documentary out of the attempt. A month before winter, Honnold sprained his ankle. After a partial recovery, he tried to make the climb but turned around before finishing.

He quit.

It was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. Imagine how much disappointment he felt. Imagine the pressure to keep going, given everything he and his friend had invested. When the influencers tell you quitting is easy, they’re not thinking about those Alex Honnold moments. Quitting takes discipline.

The French philosopher Blaise Pascal once said most of humanity’s problems stem from our inability to sit quietly in a room alone. He also probably noticed that people are really, really bad at quitting when they should. Imagine how much better the world would be if people could learn when to quit.

The entire problem behind endless growth capitalism is that the super rich think profits should keep going up forever, the population should keep expanding forever, and humanity is destined to colonize space. It’s all rooted in a pathological cultural fear of tapering off, achieving equilibrium, pulling back, holding steady, and employing caution. Political scientists and psychologists have spent decades researching quitting. They’ve learned fascinating things.

A year later, Alex Honnold tried again.

The second time, he made it. His friend was finally able to finish the documentary. It won an Oscar. Newspapers hailed Honnold as one of the greatest athletes of all time. I know what you’re thinking. Not everyone who quits wins an Oscar.

Hey, at least they don't plummet to their deaths.

Annie Duke explores the psychology of quitting in her book, Quit. She talks about Honnold's rare example of patience and restraint. Unfortunately, the vast majority of humans don't possess it. From birth, we're steeped in a culture that tells us to never give up. There's an entire genre of books, articles, speeches, podcasts, and internet slogans dedicated to this idea.

Sometimes it's called grit, other times resilience.

It's wrong.

In the 1950s, Harold Staw pioneered one of the first appliance and housewares chains in California. He made a massive amount of money and wound up expanding beyond his home state. A decade later, Kmart started outcompeting him. To stay successful, he would've had to sell off several locations.

He refused.

Not only did Staw bankrupt his business, but he also depleted his own personal fortune trying to support his first stores. He was too attached to them, a fallacy known as escalating commitment. Staw's son Barry became fascinated with his father’s story. There’s something evocative about the idea of winning first and then losing everything because you don’t know when to stop.

Barry Staw published the first paper on escalating commitment in a 1976 issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Performance. His research, no doubt inspired by watching his father's refusal to quit, found that negative consequences often compel leaders and business investors to commit even more resources toward failing endeavors. They commit the most resources when they feel personally responsible for the failure. As Annie Duke writes, "when we are getting strong signals that we're losing...we don't merely refuse to quit. We will double and triple down... and we will strengthen our belief that we are on the right path."

We’ve seen a lot of this throughout history, and it’s especially relevant now. Everyone in charge seems to be doing exactly this at the moment, doubling and tripling down on bad ideas and failed ideologies, even when they know they don’t work and they’re just going to get the world into more trouble.

Psychologists have found hope entwined with our difficulty quitting. A study by social psychologists Joel Brockner and Jeffrey Rubin found that university students would wait so long for a dictionary during a timed crossword puzzle that it invalidated a $50 reward. If they'd resigned early, they still would've earned some cash. Instead, they waited until the reward dropped to almost nothing. That's the cost of hope. Here's the punchline to the study:

There was never a dictionary.

It was a trick.

Brockner and Rubin eventually published their results from these studies in a 1985 book, Entrapment in Escalating Conflicts. In the decades since, psychologists and journalists have documented countless examples of individuals, businesses, and governments pouring billions of dollars and endless hours into projects that were going nowhere and doomed to failure.

Around the same time, Richard Thaler first introduced the idea of sunk cost fallacy in 1980, the idea that the time and money you've already committed to a failed project provides a reason to keep going.

You know, it doesn't.

But that’s how our leaders operate. From the recent election to billionaires obsessed with limitless energy and life on Mars at all cost, the richest and most powerful people on the planet are looking a lot like Harold Staw, the difference being that they’re going to bankrupt us all—not just themselves.

Animals know when to quit.

In 2019, a team of scientists played a cruel little trick on some mice. They built a device that delivered sugar for poking their snouts up a hole, gradually reducing the reward each time. Eventually, the mice were poking their snouts up the hole 20 times. That was their breaking point. After about 20 pokes, they quit.

When studying the mice's brains, the scientists found something interesting. Before giving up, there was a surge of a chemical called nociceptin, the opposite of dopamine. The scientists published their results in Cell, speculating about the possibility of helping humans with depression by artificially lowering the levels of nociceptin in their brains. I find it interesting that the scientists never concluded that maybe quitting isn’t such a bad idea when you’ve poked your nose up a hole 20 times for sugar and nothing comes out.

This study is just waiting to fall into the wrong hands. Wait, what am I talking about? It’s been six years since it was published, and I suspect the powers that be have had plenty of time to ask each other how they can get their workers to keep doing stuff, even when they take away the reward.

I'm sure CEOs would love to eliminate the nociceptin in our brains, to keep everyone chasing unattainable goals despite increasingly long odds, as they sit back and reap the rewards. Today I watched a video by a woman who said she sold $400,000 worth of product for a company, and they rewarded her by taking away her bonus. That’s the mouse study in a nutshell. A mouse who keeps performing labor without any sugar possesses immense value.

Wild animals know when to quit. We've been conditioned to never give up. Time and again, the research shows that most of us will fail to extract ourselves from a losing situation once we're in it. We won't think clearly about the risks and rewards, and we'll make bad decisions.

There's one strategy to avoid all this.

It's called kill criteria.

Annie Duke used kill criteria to become a world-class poker champion. Before going into a game or tournament, she identified clear stopping points, like losing a certain amount of money or a certain number of hands. She stuck to them. It was knowing when to quit that made her successful.

The idea of kill criteria has become a life-saving strategy for everyone from business investors to military commanders. They decided up front when they would quit. They identified trigger points. They stuck to them.

It sounds pessimistic to plan for failure.

The leaders of the free world aren’t going to adopt kill criteria when it comes to problems like overshoot and overconsumption—not unless someone makes them. Listen to the way the tech dudes talk. Look at all the money they’re investing in projects that aren’t going to save the planet.

It’s bad enough when the rich and powerful don’t know when to quit. It’s even worse when they insulate themselves from the cost of their failure. These days, it doesn’t matter if they make bad decisions. They’ve amassed so much wealth and implemented so many unfair, unethical, and corrupt policies that they’ve completely bypassed failure. It’s easy, because they’re not using their own capital and labor anymore. They get subsidies and loans via taxes we pay. They get to exploit our time, energy, and labor. When they fail, we pay the price.

They pay nothing.

Imagine if Alex Honnold didn’t die if he fell at El Capitan. What if his failures simply resulted in death and injury for someone else?

How many times would he try?

Maybe Alex Honnold himself is a good person who wouldn’t take advantage of a situation like that. But that’s the situation humanity has found itself in. Entrapment in escalating conflicts has even become a way to make money for several different industries, especially defense. There’s always a ton of profit to be made from someone else’s refusal to quit when they should.

It's easy to go around chanting "never give up" when you have endless access to government contracts, forgivable loans, a disposable workforce, and rich parents. They think they're like Alex Honnold, except they're not free-soloing El Capitan without a rope. They're just pretending.

We're the rope.