Freakonomics was a very popular and entertaining book a few years ago that drew some pretty controversial conclusions about social problems from statistical analysis, and is classified under "Economics." The authors wrote a follow-up called Superfreakonomics, which I have not read, and have now issued Think Like a Freak, wherein they explicitly try to teach us how to ask different questions in order to get better answers. Their style remains light, entertaining, and long on memorable anecdotes rather than abstract theorizing, and they make 6 main points which are quite adequately summarized on their own website and in this Forbes article.
This book makes a great compare-and-contrast with David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell's latest, about which I wrote here. The tone is much more light-hearted, but the goal is the same: how can we get our minds out of the boxes we normally keep them in and solve some problems? They made a lot of sort of theoretically interesting points that might help me if I wanted to eat a lot of hot dogs or identify terrorists or maybe even weed out a large pool of job applicants, but the chapter that really was directly applicable to my life right now was the last one, the one about quitting.
"Never give up! Never surrender!" says Tim Allen in Galaxy Quest, but in real life it turns out that quitting can really make you happier. I guess happiness isn't everything, but, all other things being equal, it sure beats the alternative. The authors give examples from their own lives and describe a highly unscientific experiment that is still running on their website here. Well, not so much of an experiment any more as a service-- I just tried it, and it's more of a Magic 8 Ball than anything else, as it doesn't harvest any follow-up data anymore. Anyway, the point is that based on the self-reported experiences of many people who did or didn't quit something, quitters do, in fact, sometimes win.
The reasons for this are many. One classy-sounding one is the opportunity cost of continuing what you're doing versus the sunk cost of having done it so far-- when you quit something, you suddenly free up all the resources that were going into it, and can pursue other new and different things that may be more rewarding. But then there's also the unknown possibility of giving up right before it gets good. And then there's just the emotional distaste many of us have for quitting!
To pick a simple example, say you are waiting in line for free Rita's Water Ice on the first day of Spring. The line is moving more slowly than you had expected. Do you keep waiting or ditch? Well, you've already spent x amount of time waiting, so if you bail, that time will be wasted. On the other hand, if you keep waiting, you will miss out on all the other Spring-like things you could be doing instead, such as gathering ye rosebuds or falling in love or whatnot. On the third hand, another counter could open up, and the line could start moving much faster. Yikes! Decisions, decisions! And that's not even a perfect example, because in many quitting situations, there is also some level of probability that you will never get what you want-- that, God forbid, Rita's will run out of water ice before you get there, in which case quitting would have been a much smarter move than holding.
Okay, so I think about this problem all the time. I think about it in my work, because I coach people working towards goals, students who have to decide whether they are done or want to keep trying. I am a firm believer that you gotta know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em. There is a time to do one more step on a math problem and arrive at the answer, and there is a time to not waste one more second on a problem that will never love you back. There is a time to try the test again to see if you can improve still more, and there is a time to say that good enough is good enough and the probable return on investment just isn't high enough to justify the massive amount of effort involved.
I also think about it in my personal life with respect to different activities I am involved in. I think about it with this blog! I am always asking myself whether what I am doing is worth the time and effort, but then I don't want to allow myself to be a quitter. But at some point, if you keep adding new things and never quit any of the others, you can't physically do it all, so that's a consideration. I still have trouble with the concept that it could be okay to do some things just for a period of time, though, even though that's obviously sort of how life in the physical world just is. No one joins a bowling league with the idea that they will continue with it for the rest of their life, but somehow teaching Sunday school, for example, seems different. It seems like it's part of who you are and is not something you should just quit. Maybe that's why my favorite kind of activity is an ad-hoc project, with "quitting time" built in!
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