In 2002, Stewart Butterfield conceived ideas for a massively multiplayer online video game. But without the funds to make his dream a reality, he and his colleagues focused on building a side project that would later become a full-time gig. [1]
Seven years later, with the proper financial backing in place, Butterfield realized his vision in the form of Glitch: “a quirky, lovely online game,” as described by Business Insider, that focused on collaborative crafting and gathering activities.
Yet, despite its rave reviews and fan following, the game was costly to run, and after failing to attract a large audience, Butterfield was forced to shut it down permanently. Undeterred, the Canadian returned to an idea that began as an internal tool during the making of Glitch.
Today, that “internal” tool—better known as Slack—is an instant-messaging software with 20 million registered users and a market cap of around $27 billion. Call it pivoting. Call it fortitude (if you know what happened next), but Butterfield knew when to quit.
The Hidden Barriers to Quitting
We often read about people achieving their goals in the face of adversity. By channeling grit and persevering with unwavering certainty, they’re able to attain the unthinkable. We’re also reminded of the many that came before them, only to fall short of their goal by quitting before the finish line.
While grit and perseverance are essential in achieving our biggest, most ambitious goals, narratives like the above imply that hard work and blind persistence are all that is needed to get us to where we want to go. Indeed, knowing when to quit, as Butterfield knew, is as important.
One reason it’s hard to quit, explains Annie Duke in her book, Quit, is the sunk cost fallacy. When we experience a sunk cost, we’re more likely to continue a course of action because we have invested heavily in it—even when it’s clear altering our course of action would be more beneficial in the long term.
A similar, albeit more alluring, reason it’s hard to quit is due to commitment bias. When we’re committed to an outcome, we’re more likely to continue a behavior with increasingly adverse outcomes rather than altering to a more positive course. We might know that the behavior is irrational, but we nevertheless align with our previous actions and behaviors.
Our bias toward valuing our ideas higher, often irrationally, than their market value—also known as the endowment effect—is precisely why we stay in the game longer than we should. Of course, the longer we stay on course, the greater the effect magnifies, and the easier it is to continue doing what we’ve always done.
Now that we’ve covered two of the hidden barrier to quitting, let’s discuss how to minimize them.
Kill Criteria (Or How to Know When to Walk Away)
One way to overcome the biases that plague our decision-making is to define kill criteria before embarking on a goal or project. Kill criteria involves setting measurable benchmarks that force you to think about your intended outcomes. If you don’t meet them, you drop the project and move on to something else.
Criteria could include time or money invested, a deadline, or making your first dollar. For instance, if you’re building an online course to make more money, you might decide that if you don’t make a certain amount in presales, you’ll refund everyone’s money and pursue another project to meet your goal.
If you want to develop high-quality kill criteria, you might consider doing a pre-mortem. Work backward from your intended outcome to determine what potentially could lead to the failure of the goal or project, and take preventive actions to protect your outcome.
Returning to our online course example, you might realize that not having enough interest could lead to a lack of preorders, and therefore decide to focus on building a bigger audience first. When we remove our rose-tinted glasses and realize the reality of our biggest goals, it’s much easier to see potential red flags.
Knowing the expected value of a goal or project will help further with exercises like the above. When you imagine the potential gains and losses relating to the outcome you want to attain, you can consider alternative ways to meet them—providing you keep in the mind the expected value for them as well.
“Even after you have found a path that you want to stick to, keep doing some exploration,” writes Duke. “Things change, and whatever you are doing now may not be the best path for you to pursue in the future.” Having more options, as Duke suggests, gives us something to switch to when the time is right.
Only when we identify and overcome our biases and make strategic decisions about quitting can we work toward the vital few things that make the biggest contributions to our goals. Take risks, of course, but make sure the game is as rigged as much as possible for you to win.
Footnotes
[1] Butterfield’s full-time gig turned into Flickr, the mega-popular image-hosting service with more than 112 million users.
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