Should You Quit? Ask These Four Questions First

A lot of advice focuses on what to do, but advice focusing on what to quit is comparatively rare. Every path taken necessarily implies another path ignored, so the two must matter equally.

In some ways, choosing to quit is harder than choosing to take action. We all know we should exercise, read, meditate, socialize, work hard, spend time with family, and drink eight glasses of water every day. But when that list inevitably becomes unmanageable, it’s hard to say what we ought to stop.

Another reason the importance of quitting is less often discussed is that worthwhile pursuits are often challenging, and it is tempting to surrender to early difficulties. “Never give up” is an unrealistic slogan, but it may serve us well in situations where we’re tempted to give up on our dreams and watch Netflix instead.

Because we devote more time to thinking about projects we should undertake, rather than those we should abandon, the latter tends to occur impulsively. We quit because we’re tired, bored, or because something else seems more appealing. 

I think this is a mistake. Thinking more deliberately about when to give up might improve our decisions more than simply choosing more tasks to add to our to-do list.

Here are four questions you can ask yourself to help make the decision.

1. The past is done. Do the future benefits outweigh the costs?

It’s often helpful to start with figuring out what an ideally rational person would do in your situation. If you could consult an oracle who never gets tired or frustrated, and could calculate the right decision, what would she tell you to do?

Oracles don’t exist, so we’ll have to settle for economic theory. A key concept is sunk costs. This is the idea that when making a decision in the present moment, past investments don’t matter. All that matters is how much you anticipate investing in the future, and whether those investments will pay off.

Suppose you’ve invested three years working toward an accounting degree in college. But if you could go back, you’d study engineering instead. Should you quit accounting and switch majors or stick it out?

It’s tempting to analyze this decision by considering it as a whole: “Do I want to study accounting or engineering?” But this isn’t correct. The better question is, “Will it be better for me to invest one more year and get an accounting degree, or switch immediately and start four years studying engineering?”

The previous three years are sunk costs and thus shouldn’t be weighed in your decision about whether to quit. The only thing that matters is future costs and future benefits. Perhaps you decide that having an accounting degree for only one more year of work is worth it, even if you want to study engineering after that.

In this case, an analysis of sunk costs discouraged us from quitting early, but it can easily go the other way.

Suppose you’ve spent three years working on a business idea. Initially, the market looked promising, so you quit your job and spent three years trying to build a company. Now, however, the forecast looks gloomy. You think it will take another three years at least before you can make a go of it—and there are other opportunities that might be better. Should you stay the course, or switch?

Once again, the past three years don’t matter. Even if those turned out to be a waste of time, they shouldn’t change your decision overall. All that matters is whether the future time (and money) you will invest is better spent continuing or quitting.

An economic perspective encourages detachment. The question is not “Would I undertake this project if I had to start again?” instead it’s “What’s the value of continuing versus quitting (compared to my alternatives)?”

Sometimes a half-finished project you’re no longer excited about makes more sense to finish because there’s little work needed to complete it. Sometimes a pursuit you poured your soul into needs to be thrown out because the future investment needed to make it work isn’t worth the payoff.

2. Don’t rush to act. When’s the best point to re-evaluate your exit?

The economic perspective is useful, but it’s only one part of the story. After all, if we could easily make dispassionate decisions about whether to stick it out or give up, deciding what to do—or to quit—wouldn’t be so tricky. The real difficulty is that we alternate between feeling unable to let go of projects and abandoning projects for shiny new pursuits, in neither case explicitly weighing the merits of our choice. Emotion, not reason, looms larger in our decision-making.

We can’t eliminate our emotions when making decisions. And we wouldn’t want to, even if we could. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio illustrates, patients with damage to emotional centers of their brain are not hyper-efficient Vulcans, rather they’re hopelessly lost—wasting hours on unimportant tasks because they can’t properly evaluate what matters most.

But there is a happy medium. One way we can tame some of our worst impulses, without undermining the real value our emotions bring to decision-making, is by creating structures that can influence our decisions.

One structure I find particularly helpful is to define your quitting points in advance. By setting up projects that have well-defined exit ramps, you can ensure you don’t make decisions based on momentary temptations.

For instance, I tend to work on learning projects in focused bursts, rather than making lifelong commitments. Part of the reason for this is that it’s much easier to commit to learning a new language for thirty days than to assume automatically that I’ll want, or be able, to invest in it lifelong. Thirty days is a relatively small commitment, so it’s easier to bolster my commitment even when I’m not feeling like it.

Another structure that can be helpful is creating an automatic delay or review period for any quitting decision. When you’re convinced you want to give up, set a reminder in one week or one month to re-evaluate. For bigger goals, you might want to set the reminder once you’re past a particularly stressful period—such as deciding whether to quit a job after a big project wraps up, or deciding if you want to switch majors after your final exams—so you’re making the decision from relative neutrality.

In both of these cases, the length of the pre-commitment period is crucial. Too short, and you’ll allow temporary impulses to drive your decisions. Too long, and you might not be able to endure, defaulting to an emotional response rather than a reasoned one.

3. The grass isn’t always greener. What’s the day-to-day reality of the alternative to my current course?

Frustration and stress are only one emotional factor. Distractions can be a far bigger issue. How often have you embarked on one goal only to find yourself pulled toward a new one that seems like a better opportunity?

Construal-level theory argues that we tend to evaluate decisions using different frames of reference: we view lofty goals idealistically, omitting their complications and details, and we view daily to-do lists pragmatically, with a focus on what’s expedient. But this sets us up for failure, because our current project gets the nitty-gritty treatment, whereas any new pursuit gets viewed through the hazy lens of idealism. Who wouldn’t want to switch under those circumstances?

One way to overcome this cognitive illusion is to give yourself a brief, realistic experience of pursuing your alternative. If you’re thinking about switching majors, take a full class (including homework and exams) from your potential new field. If you’re thinking about switching markets, make a prototype and try to pitch it. Low-key commitments often help us realize that the new pursuit has just as many obstacles and challenges as our current one and can temper the desire to switch.

If you’re unable to devote time to experience the new pursuit in full detail, it can sometimes be helpful to shift the current project back into the higher construal level to make a fairer comparison. Spend an hour or two journaling about your ultimate goals and values for the project. What originally got you excited about it?

Finally, a strategy I employ regularly is procrastination. When I get new project ideas, I deliberately put them in a “someday” pile on the back burner. Procrastination is often seen as a vice, but procrastinating on possible distractions means I end up completing more projects. Some of those “someday” projects will make it into reality, but many will be forgotten about entirely as they turned out to be momentary impulses.

4. Know your values. Which lines won’t you cross?

Emotions can sometimes lead us to quit impulsively, but they can also lead us to stay in situations we should walk away from. Sometimes, not quitting is the worse decision, because sticking around in a bad relationship, job or project can waste years of our lives with little to show for our time and effort. Indeed, while quitting prematurely has its costs, sticking out to the bitter end of a failed pursuit is the real tragedy.

Make clear, bright-line rules about when you’ll quit, even if you’re tempted to stay. Here are some conditions where I would advocate quitting:

• The pursuit no longer aligns with your deeply-held values. For instance, if you start a job with one understanding of the work, but later realize that sticking through will require betraying your internal code of ethics or behaving in a way that’s contrary to your values, quitting is best.
• The costs of the pursuit clearly exceed its benefits, and there is no clear short-term exit. I often do push myself to finish projects which (mildly) fail the cost-benefit test if the end of the project is near, because I think a moderate degree of perseverance is worth cultivating. But if the costs are dramatically higher than the benefits, or if there is no clear natural exit for the pursuit, quitting is often necessary.
• You’re trying to recoup a loss that has already occurred. One place human nature tends to irrationally discourage quitting is when we’ve lost something and are desperate to “undo” that loss. Gamblers call this going “on tilt,” where a player is no longer making rational analyses because of bets that went bad.

Every decision is unique, so there’s no single right answer for when to quit. But if you have a process for thinking about those decisions, you’ll be more likely to land on a reasonable choice.