Grit is upright. But so can giving up.

From politics to sports to business, we tend to glorify those who persevere, who show grit, who never give up. But poker expert and handbook expert Annie Duke argues that there’s also a big toll to giving up—whether it’s a project, a job, a profession, or a business. She walks us through the biases that keep us stuck in the plan quo, even when other paths are undoubtedly more fruitful, and explains how to plan better choices. Duke is the author of

Quit: The Vitality of Vivid When to Hurry Away.

ANNIE DUKE: Okay, to be polite, I haven't considered every single practice, so I'm not sure I'm perfectly equipped to answer that. But what I will tell you is that bias is a treasure trove of the lost cause fallacy, for example, that leads us to make a myth out of what we've already spent on deciding whether or not to pursue a venture further or continue the loss aversion, the giving plan, the set of people we put in possession, how much we overvalue the things we've created versus the same things we haven't created. Even issues with identity, those really do decrease across cultures. These are findings that have been replicated over about half a decade of scientific learning. So I think that's certainly a large, fragment of the human condition.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And there are so many cognitive biases. You've rightly called out some of them that push us to get into trouble even when there are indicators telling us we shouldn't. In your work as a manual, a human moving about the realm, which one do you seem to come up with most often for fuckeys thinking about their careers?

ANNIE DUKE: I’m not really going to lay one out in the fable that I think it’s a combination of two problems. One would gallop under the considerable category of sunk cargo. So in a workplace, you’ll find that people don’t shut down initiatives, they don’t abandon a product that they’re building, and they don’t quit their jobs in the fable of saying, “Well, then I’m going to waste my time or my money if I quit.” So we wouldn’t want to quit a job in the fable that we’re saying, “I’ve put so much time into this. I’ve spent all these years in school practicing and figuring it out. And if I quit, I’m going to waste all that time. Wouldn’t I be in favor of shutting down this project in the fable of all the money that we’ve already spent on it? If I quit, there’s no way to make up for that.”

Now, that's a fallacy in the fable that it's already been spent. What really matters is whether the next minute or the next dollar or the next effort that you just put into this project is purposeful. So I would explain that it's a proper power of fact that keeps us from giving up.

But interestingly on the other side of the issue, I would explain that loss aversion also actually prevents us from giving up. So it is a bit unusual that the fable of loss aversion originates from the dilemma of starting problems, in the sense that we are curious about the possible losses that will undoubtedly be related to the solution we can plan, without thinking about what the upfront charge is or what the final return on investment is.

This you can simply ask, “Well, what does this desire to give up originate with?” Well, if you’re leaving something, you’re not right to give up, you’re going to start a contemporary thing. And so, if we now have an aversion to starting things where we’re waiting on techniques through which they also simply don’t determine, that can actually prevent us from starting contemporary things, which in turn prevents us from giving up.

So a simple example of this is you'll hear people when they're in a job that they hate, explaining precious things: "Well, wouldn't I be in favor of giving up the fable of what if I was in favor of a contemporary brand job and I hated that one and it wasn't stylish?"

ALISON BEARD: The devil is better than the devil you are not.

ANNIE DUKE: Just. And that’s really loss aversion talking, right? It’s a treasure, “Well, I know I’m going to be poor at this job, but when I start something new, what if I’m poor at it successfully?” It doesn’t at all indicate the fact that chances are you’re going to have a much better chance of being successful in the new venture than the one you’re starting. And for the youngsters who are probably thinking, “Well, chances are you’re going to have loss aversion for the things you’re already doing?” The answer is not very much. It’s asymmetrical. Since the plan quo, no matter what we’re starting, we don’t have faith in it as starting something new every day. Even if the truth be told, it is.

So in a sense, every day that you just start it, you're starting it over, but we don't want to abandon that pattern. So where loss aversion really comes into play is in the idea of giving up one thing to start a new thing. Maybe, maybe, you see where these two biases work together in a really bad pattern, which is, I wouldn't want to give up something to pain. I've wasted all the money I've ever put into it, and I wouldn't want to start a new thing in the myth that I'm worried about, I'm not sure.

ALISON BARBA: Yeah. It sounds like a treasure trove that can be equally well-known when companies are thinking about initiatives and techniques to pursue. Is there a specific cognitive bias that you just look for more in most cases in organizational settings? It's opportunity burden neglect. We're not inclined to favor in fable the gains that can also be very successfully tied to 1 other speed path in comparability to the thing we're already doing. So the odds are that you'll by chance generate sources that will undoubtedly be pursuing a specific project, these are sources that may not pursue other initiatives.

And another project that you will probably pursue has both losses and gains attached to it. We are almost shortsighted in the sense that we really cannot even look at the other alternatives that will undoubtedly be available to us and that causes us to neglect the gains that can also be very successfully attached to those other alternatives.

One of the areas that I think is very separate and not issues that are valued by strategic initiatives is job selection. So people can very well generate low performers in a job. What I see is, at any given time, people are really focused on, “Well, what if I fire them and I don’t hire anyone who is smart for this new role?” What they’re overlooking is the revenue.

One of the questions I try to raise with them is I explain, “Well, have faith that you just let this person gallop along and didn’t turn into anybody on paper? Wouldn’t that be better or worse?”

We work with the treasury issues, “Well, they’re having a really detrimental impact on the crew, so if they weren’t there, I think the crew’s behavior would definitely be healthier.” Generally, the answer is that maybe it’s better not to create anyone in the role.

And then we really try to get a point of curiosity about what is the chance that any contemporary individual will undoubtedly be better than the person that you just generated in order to generate a study to compile them to stop specializing in the possible of the loss and start specializing in the gains that can also be very successfully linked to other alternatives. And this in total helps compile them to those selections more quickly, whether it's about employment or not, deciding to stop pursuing a sales lead or ending a strategic initiative.

ALISON BEARD: I know the first step in all of this is to recognize these biases when they come, but you make a really neat point in the book that there is a distinction between recognizing that they exist and fighting them so they don't affect you.

ANNIE DUKE: So you're absolutely right, Alison. I maintain that we now have the intuition that once we all learn about all these biases that we've acquired, we didn't originate them. So if I clearly lay out the irrecoverable charge policy for you and I explain, "Thinking, you're buying a stock at 50 and you're buying and selling it at 40, you're more likely to hold that stock than you are compared to whether or not the odds are that you might pick up that stock at 40."

So in other words, you shouldn't have the stock at 40, you shouldn't have kept it right in the fable of you taking it to 50. So now I've told you that and I'm sure, Alison, that the odds are that you're going to generate the intuition. Okay, okay, now I know that so I didn't buy any more.

ALISON BEARD: Just. But you state a really moving story in the book and some researchers who knew all this.

ANNIE DUKE: Yeah. So there's a long period of time where every person between these forces, every cognitive and motivational gallop down related to failure to quit, and it's known as escalation of commitment. Escalation of commitment is a broad phenomenon that we now have an intuition that after we start something, when we see information that tells us that things are not going well, we will actually stop doing what we're doing. What a lot of researchers have shown, most notably Barry Staw and someone named Jeffrey Rubin, who are almost the pioneers in this field, is that it's perversely the opposite in the sense that we will actually increase our commitment to the losing cause. So we look at the negative indicators and we correct more investment.

Jeffrey Rubin became one of the pioneers, as I said, and he became a great expert on these issues of lock-in, these issues of climbing commitment. Jeffrey Rubin also became at one time a really avid mountain climber. He had a goal to climb the hundred peaks. He was once climbing his hundredth peak with a graduate student and a really heavy fog rolled in. His graduate student said, “Hey, I really don’t think we should keep climbing. It’s moderately cloudy here.”

And he said, “No, it’s beautiful. I’ll keep going.” The graduate student became round and Jeffrey Rubin’s body became once accomplished two days later. So for anyone who thinks that fascination is about doing, he really understood these problems of being stuck in lost causes, the way we ignore the signs we should be pointing out. But he kept going and died.

ALISON BEARD: One of the solutions you just suggested is to calculate the anticipated load of a given path of speed that may well be where the odds are that you may also be very successful. You may also be doing something different. As a poker player, you're used to thinking about probabilities, but to our relief, how do you plan efficient estimates in this scheme, especially when there are internal factors, your feelings generated, but also external factors that value the market and success?

ANNIE DUKE: Okay, first of all, I would be right in favor of planning something really decided that you should plan a resolution, whether or not you're doing it explicitly or not, the odds are that you're also probably making all these predictions very successfully. The odds are that you're also probably making all these estimates very successfully. If I marry a certain person A as a substitute for a certain person B, what's implicit in that is that I'm certain that the chances that I'm happier with a certain person A are greater than the chances that I'm happier with person B.

I hang where we compiled stumbled is that once we are announcing it loudly and explicitly, we give it some conception treasure a look. All the amazing odds are that you by chance may also be very successful or execrable. But it's not about being correct or execrable, it's about thinking explicitly about what path will be possible to allow you to achieve your targets. Given what on day 2, finding out that it's a prediction and it's probabilistic and also you're having to create these fascinating items very minutes in comparability with everything there is to be known.

But if you are going to do it implicitly anyway, it is always better to do it explicitly. First, chances are you will probably ask people about it and then they will become friends to give their point of view. You will probably also look for problems with taking one career over another. I will do a sensible study what is the chance of promotion? How long does it benefit any individual from the distance I am taking to build to the next stage or to build into management and even build to the C-suite.

And the most important thing is, if you do this, chances are you'll actually write these questions down, and as the kingdom unfolds because you do, it becomes a little easier to complete the feedback loops that would allow you to be taught, in the fable of probabilities, you'll perhaps see what became when I thought back then? Why did I take the path I chose? And now it's a lot easier to learn from that.

We think of front-loading as a treasure: “Well, I’d really like to figure out exactly what my return on investment is going to be.” But we can think more broadly and correctly about, “What are the potentials that I’m happy to do A or B?” Snug being a proxy for your full problems that we charge. And I’ve actually done this with people. I did this with a girl named Sarah Olstyn Martinez, who was once an emergency room physician who was once really, really unhappy in her job.

She asked me to come up with a solution about whether or not she should quit. She had another job offer from an insurance company where she had been working as a case manager. So I said to her, “Well, if you’re deeply unhappy and have been in the job you’re in for years, why not consider the possibility that you might like to lead and favor this modern job and loss aversion?” She said, “Well, what if the modern job doesn’t determine it?” So I changed the conversation to one of the front-loaded ones, but one that is palatable to anyone who isn’t that mathematically inclined.

I said, “Consider it’s a year from now. What are the chances that you’re excited about for your new space?” And she said, “Well, that’s 0%.” I said, “K, so have faith that you like this contemporary work. I understand that you’re worried that you’re not sure, but what are you thinking that the chance is that you’re happy in this contemporary space?” She said, “Well, I’m not sure, but I’m telling you that it’s going to be a 50-50 treasure.” And I said, “Well, it’s 50% greater than zero.” She said, “Sure,” and she gave up the next day. By the way, she’s much happier for it.

ALISON BEARD: In explaining this it seems less complicated for either choice. You had a long line in the e-book, “Success is not in dwelling on the problems, it’s in choosing the right thing to do to leave the relief. But that means between more than one alternative, choosing the supreme one that will give you the greatest probability of achieving the greatest number of possibilities that you may have. So what do you think people should find when they are faced with more than one path?

ANNIE DUKE: First, ask yourself, can I do any of these things in parallel? For example, I once became a talented poker player and once became a decision-making speaker and did some consulting. Clearly, that made it much easier when I thought about quitting poker that I had one more thing to point out.

ALISON BEARD: And companies moderately obviously want to originate that. They're looking for more than one initiative right away. So what's an elegant scheme to solve what's the strongest chance versus the problems that are good to leave undone?

ANNIE DUKE: So one is right about the total that you're choosing to start something, you're going to make your best guess at it. So the odds are that you're probably going to want to get as good information as the odds are, maybe, maybe. The optimistic odds are that you're going to maybe compile some inappropriate accusations, in other words, gather what happens in scenarios very similar to what you're thinking about. Get diverse perspectives from the participants on your team. Focus on the probabilities of sources that you're likely to generate and then plan your most efficient forecast or trained company on what are the most fruitful paths to change and reject relief.

But what comes with this, thanks to these disturbances that we have compiled in stuck things is that now we want to think about approach about what would make us stop the object that we are starting. We must follow a route that will determine 80% of time and by definition it means that it will not determine 20% of time and we do not generate any surveillance on that fragment of the equation.

So what I advise for the fogeys to start with is to explain, “Consider that this is a year from now and the issues haven’t been determined. They’ve been more or less a catastrophe. Looking back, you’re saying that there were early indicators that the issues weren’t going well. What were they?” And then you write those issues down. So if it’s a project, you might want to start with schedule overruns, budget overruns, product failures, early indicators that you’re not getting product-market fit, for example. But you write those issues down.

Now, chances are you’ll come up with a checklist of what I would call demolition criteria. If you read these things on this planet, you stop and now you move on to something else, which is a chance you’ve just rejected in the past. Maybe it’s also a brand new chance you’ve been thinking about recently. What this will do is that in most cases it will plan and explain that you’re just cutting corners on choosing a route that didn’t end up working out successfully.

Because what we now want to be aware of on any other occasion is that once we start the problems, we are doing so under uncertainty. The elegant information is that we can present when we retrieve the contemporary information. The harmful information is that science tells us that we did not originate this. In explaining, that is what we are trying to solve.

ALISON BEARD: We hear from Silicon Valley, especially this whole concept of grumpy failure, which is essentially just grumpy quitting, right? Solving a project that's not working and letting it sit there and then chances are you'll maybe redirect your energies elsewhere. So what are some of the techniques you see organizations doing that?

ANNIE DUKE: Yeah, so first of all, I would rightly be in favor of claiming I hate the time when the time fails grumpily in the story makes it seem like stopping the treasure is a failure. And I think stopping something that is not intentional is a success. I wish people would start saying, “Prevail grumpily or quit grumpily.” I hang this obsession with failure, I’m not sure it’s intentional on the fable that keeps tying quitting to failure. And quitting is not much of a failure.

But there's a flawed scheme that chances are you might have the ability to prioritize initiatives, which is to plan whether the path you're on is the right path to take in the story that you've actually solved the cruel piece of the dilemma. So let me try to use a mental model. And this mental model comes from Astro Teller, who is the CEO, also known as the Captain of Moonshots at X, which is the innovation center at Google. So obviously they're doing things that are undoubtedly going to be highly dangerous when they start a project, largely the issues won't determine, but when they do determine, it will operate outside of the common business for the realm.

And the way that Astro Teller approaches the whole thing is that he wants to get to that answer really quickly of whether or not the goal that they're pursuing is worth pursuing. So he offers this mental model, which I think is terribly unbiased, called Monkeys and Pedestals, and here's the diagram. ) So Alison, trust that you've just decided that you're going to do an act. And the act is that you're just going to collectively have a monkey juggle flaming torches while standing on a pedestal. Now, obviously, people are going to give you a lot of money for that. Yay.

So if you are going to practice this project, there are roughly two objects in the project. One is practicing the monkey to juggle the flaming torches and the other is building the pedestal. So my demand for you is, which one should you attack first?

ALISON BEARD: Okay, I learned the book, so let's collectively put the monkey on.

ANNIE DUKE: Just. Now, what's intriguing even assuming is that in fashion design planning, people would create the pedestal first. And the reason for waiting for that is that the pedestal is generally known as the low-hanging fruit. I'm sure you've been to design conferences where people are like, "Well, what should we source? Well, what's the low-hanging fruit? Let's source that first." Well, the problem with building pedestals first is that the odds are that you might source it.

While you create the pedestal first, it is the phantom of development. You are not really doing any development on the fable of probabilities, but you happen to originate it. The bottleneck, the cruel bit of the dilemma is that the probabilities are that you happen to happen to collectively put that monkey to juggle the flaming torches, that is the thing you simply do not know.

So what Astro Teller’s mental dummy tells us is that we want to attack the hard part of the dilemma first. In other words, when we’re thinking about pursuing something, we want to say, “What are the unknowns? What are the bottlenecks to success? And we’re not going to create anything until we figure out if we can solve that.”

So, here's a really elegant example of the power of Monkeys and Pedestals through the use of prioritization. So, at some point in X's history, they were launched into the hyperloop, which is basically a vacuum tube that can facilitate a collective shift from creep to creep in the United States in two hours. So it's an infinite, excessive pull rail. So in this particular case, the capabilities themselves weren't a monkey in the fable of what had already been proven. That you can just gallop problems through these tubes very well. But they did mention two monkeys that they didn't know if they could solve. The first one had to originate with regulatory issues, which became once you're going to want to gallop this formulation through many, many different municipalities. Each of those is going to generate different regulations. And that seemed like a treasure, in fact, a remarkable dilemma to solve. It's going to work, it's important to understand, given the speeds that this is going to reach, that the odds are that you're going to be able to stop playing collectively safely without killing people on board. In explaining that it is a moderately extensive monkey, correct?

And just as they discussed, they designate that in figuring out to compile and put together your complete plan for maintaining surveillance, that you're just going to want in most cases to create almost your complete thing sooner than the odds are that you're going to by chance resolve the odds are that you're going to by chance stop it safely, which is tons and tons and tons of money before we can decide whether or not we can safely stop the thing.

For them to reject the premise, how long did it take them to reject the use of jacks and pedestals? It took them 15 minutes. Now, let's compare that to Virgin, which set out to pursue the hyperloop. They've raised hundreds of tens of millions of dollars for this. And there was an editorial right there in the original York Times, maybe a month ago, where they were like, "Oh, the hyperloop is in mourning. We can't decide whether we're going to have the capacity to do this whole scheme of yours nationwide, given the fact that each municipality has different principles."

But then the big thing became that once they had built so much of the system to compile the data together that about a sixth of the rate could perhaps by chance be within reach of extinction. They had never been in an area to do a real safety test, and so they couldn't abandon ship. In their role, they're turning around, let's explain how instead of trying to bring people across the country, they want to bring cargo across the country, which is a dilemma that we didn't really create.

ALISON BEARD: Let me give you a counterexample, even supposing. So we've all heard the story of the James Webb telescope that turned into years and hundreds of tens of millions of dollars of pattern, many, many challenges, setbacks. Eventually they came up with an origin and so they deployed it, and now they're sending us pictures from the confines of the set. So every now and then it works, right, try hard, don't give up? Just don't follow problems. It's just good to follow up on problems that are undoubtedly going to be intentional. So I feel like with the James Webb telescope, although there were setbacks, they really did the monkey-solved thing. In other words, they took into account the very fact that they could very well create the lens. They knew they could very well open it on the set. I mean, we already had the Hubble telescope up there. Just? The cruel bit of the dilemma, I'm sure they were very confident that they could solve it. And if you've decided that the odds are that you might solve the dilemma fragment and the reward is wide and wide, then it's important to eliminate the setbacks as well. In fact, I don't create any dilemmas with this in conjunction with your birth life.

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I'll ask you about successful founders and CEOs, politicians and musicians, actors and athletes who come up with tons of adversity and don't give up on their needs and don't sleep much to get it right, but I give you some idea it's the same thing. It's a treasure that they created this calculated chance that they have the skills or the connections or have the flexibility, frankly, to build where they want to go to build towards that goal.

ANNIE DUKE: Yeah. I mean, look, first of all, I want to be really careful about survivorship bias here. So I want to be really careful about the founder who rode the entire fashion all the way to the 50,000 close, couldn't raise another round, stuck with it, and by some cleverness managed to pin it down and make us favor the other founder. The lesson from this is that it's good to ride the entire fashion all the way to your 50,000 close and keep going, right?

ALISON BEARD: Yeah. Everybody knows that most founders fail.

ANNIE DUKE: Just. But at any other time, I think it's a calibration dilemma. That's where we want to value courage is extensive. Sure, you look like something people don't look at, but every now and then when the kingdom is screaming at you to stop and you ignore them, that's no longer a virtue. Then it's madness.

ALISON BEARD: In explaining this leads me to demand that you correct about another announcement that you just heard your whole time quit while you're ahead. Say you're thinking that this is the right thing to do?

ANNIE DUKE: Yeah. So quitting while you're ahead is a bad idea. But on the other hand, every idea about quitting is a bad idea. So the odds are that you're going to create winners who never quit, quitters who never use, etc. So we all know that's a really bad idea in the story of winners who quit a lot. They quit their whole problems that aren't intentional to explain that they're going to follow the problems that are going to be. Quitting while you're ahead is definitely going to be a really bad idea about the mistakes we make about quitting are mostly quitting too late, but sometimes it has to start with quitting too early.

And especially when we give up too quickly is when we move forward. So in fact, a simple example in fact, you should get a study on retail traders, with success, retail traders will also choose to place orders. It's treasure that you take at 50, at 60, you will automatically put it on the market and favor the brand. And what happens is they also murder those orders, but in an attempt to put it on the market at 55.

In other words, they'll promote much sooner than the favor makes them have room in order. Why? Because when we're ahead, we value giving up and turning those paper gains into realized gains in the fable that we wouldn't want to keep the chance. And so we don't need recommendation. Quit while you're ahead, in the fable we've already originated it if truth be told too quickly.

ALISON BEARD: Great. Well done, thank you very much for teaching us about the price of giving up once in a while and never again. It's been a pleasure.

ANNIE DUKE: Very good, thank you very much.

ALISON BEARD: This is Annie Duke, author of Quit: The Vitality of Vivid When to Press Away. While you’re enjoying this episode, we’re now creating more podcasts to empower you to manage yourself, your team, and your organization. Listen to them at hbr.org/podcasts or search for HBR on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

This episode was produced by Maria Doe. We’re joined by Desire Eckhardt, a technical assistant. Hannah Bates is our audio production assistant, and Ian Fox is our audio product manager. Thanks for checking out the HBR IdeaCast.

. We'll be waiting with a contemporary episode of the brand on Tuesday. I'm Alison Beard.