When To Quit
I'm taking this week off but I didn't want to leave you without your weekly helping of ADHD goodness, so I reached into the archives to find an episode that would fit in with our series on goal setting.
It may seem like goal setting and quitting don't go hand in hand, but undoubtedly we're going to have some goals that we're going to want to quit at - when we ask this question of when should I quit, we're also asking, when should I go on?
There are plenty of reasons that we should give up any particular endeavor - sometimes it just doesn't make sense to keep going - sometimes we don't have the resources to make it happen - sometimes we just don't care about the goal anymore. Typically the advice we get on our goals is that we should always try and persevere through any difficulty, but that tends to actually be real crap advice, sometimes the right answer is that we should stop going. But knowing when to stop isn't easy.
In today's episode, we're going to be exploring both the questions of when should I keep going and then when should I throw in the towel. We'll also be looking at why we keep going when all signs tell us we should stop and what gets us to quit prematurely.
This Episode’s Top Tips
We've got to give up the notion that winners never quit. Persistence doesn't guarantee success - we can persist at the wrong things forever and never make progress.
There are two curves we've got to look for when starting something new - the dip and the cul-de-sac. A cul-de-sac is a dead end. The dip is the point where things start to get hard - we've got to stop quitting things when they get hard and embrace the dip.
We'll often stick out things we should quit. There are a lot of reasons that we might stick something out like the sunk cost fallacy or the planning fallacy. Regardless of why we're sticking around, once we realize that we're in a dead-end we've got to accept that we need to quit and try something new.
Mentioned in This Episode
The Dip
