Reassuring in approach, intriguing in content. This is an all-absorbing book for anyone racked with indecision.
Feature image credit: Penguin Books Australia
How long is too long, and when is it time to give up hope?
Although the focus of this book is on business strategies and career decisions, this book applies to anyone.
Author Annie Duke is passionate about teaching people how to quit. She is highly sought out in the corporate world as a speaker on strategic decision making and navigating uncertainty, yet she is very passionate about empowering people as individuals to better their personal lives. She is a co-founder of the Alliance for Decision Education institute, which aims to teach students in America how to make better decisions.
Do you want to know when it is time to walk away? From as early on as Chapter Two, Duke notes that if you ever felt that you have quit something too early, you have probably quit on time. In other words, quit when the hope for a better outcome is so slim. Listen to people with past experience. Hedge your bets.
Wonderfully structured, this book has four main sections, the first three with three chapters each, and the final section with two chapters. She then has 47 pages of acknowledgements, notes, and a bibliography for further exploration. It serves as proof of her extensive knowledge both lived, researched, and scientific.
Section One is the Case for Quitting. Chapter One covers the psychology of grit versus quit, Chapter Two focuses on the emotion of quitting, and Chapter Three is about science. The last chapter of this section has a few graphs and equations to demonstrate probabilities; these statistically based examples of decision making continue throughout the text. If you are not a numbers person, you may find this slightly unappealing and drawn out due to the level of detail, however the concepts are well explained regardless of the underpinning data, so it is not essential reading. Rather, it serves to reassure you about your decision to quit.
Section Two is titled In the Losses. The first chapter of this section covers how and why we remain committed to failures in relationships, jobs, businesses, and things. The next chapter is the sunken cost effect, and the last of the three chapters in this section is how to make decisions thinking forward.
The last chapter of this section was one of my favourites as I have personally often set a date or timestamp on outcomes to recognise when things are not progressing. As Duke notes in this section, it is very hard to walk away when emotions are involved but it is essential as when you are “in it” psychologically at the time, commitment escalates. Therefore, I really enjoyed reading this part during which she applauds quitting as a successful habit. Duke calls this having a precommitment contract or using a set of kill criteria for any venture.
Section Three hones in on impediments that are tied up with making it hard to quit, such as identity, ownership, dissonance and the status quo. The last part of this section, aptly titled Find someone who loves you but doesn’t care about hurt feelings, is about having good business mentors around you that will tell you when you need to give up, particularly when a business or career is your “baby”, so to speak.
Section Four summarises from a different perspective many of the first three sections of the book. That is, lessons learned from forced quitting, always having a back-up plan, and the myopia of goals. This book is here to reassure you that quitting is winning. It uses multiple real life famous examples such as Muhammad Ali’s career, to highlight the failure of not quitting.
As a former world top poker player and cognitive psychologist, Duke is well versed in the art of hedging bets. In fact, her first book was titled exactly that: Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. Quit is an excellent book on life skills in every which way.
Reviewed by Rebecca Wu
The views expressed in this review belong to the author and not Glam Adelaide, its affiliates, or employees.
Distributed by: Penguin Books Australia
Released: October 2022
RRP: $35.00
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