WAVEBREAKMEDIAMICRO - STOCK.ADOBE.COM PHOTOAlmost everyone is familiar with the lyrics in Kenny Rogers’ rendition of The Gambler: “You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk away, know when to run.” However, not many people focus on the fact that three of the four alternatives Rogers offers involve quitting.
Most people don’t like to quit. Hall of Fame football coach Vince Lombardi captured the thinking of many people when he said, “Winners never quit, and quitters never win.” But was he right? Our culture puts inordinate pressure on us not to quit but, rather, to persevere and show grit. Quitting is viewed by many as a sign of weakness. For me, I am not afraid of being viewed as weak, but I don’t want to fail, and often quitting is perceived as a sign of failure.
Amy Morin, author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do — a book I often go through with people I am mentoring — states that successful people don’t keep making the same mistake. In other words, mentally strong people are willing to quit something that isn’t working for them. However, no one wants to think of themselves as a quitter, and our self-identity significantly impacts our behavior. If we are afraid that quitting will label us — even if it is just in our mind — as weak or a failure, it is hard for us to stop doing something we shouldn’t be doing.
Annie Duke, the renowned, retired professional poker player, sheds some light on knowing when to stop in her excellent book Quit. She claims that professional poker players fold much more often than amateurs, who don’t understand the importance of quitting and feel self-induced pressure to keep playing. Duke adds further insight on the importance of knowing when to redirect energy: “Success is not achieved by quitting things just because they are hard. But success is also not achieved by sticking to hard things that are not worthwhile.”
In another great book on this topic, Necessary Endings, clinical psychologist Henry Cloud writes that wise people know when to end a behavior, project, endeavor or even a relationship. Cloud states that endings are part of a natural cycle; we all need to know when to stop the bad so we can start the good.
I am a high-energy guy, but all of us have a limited amount of energy. If a leader is allocating their energy toward something not beneficial, they need to consider the opportunity costs. They could be spending that energy doing something impactful.
Leaders need to be real with themselves when evaluating whether to continue something, though self-deception often makes that challenging. Leaders should get outside opinions from people they trust, and if those folks are wondering why they won’t stop something, they probably should stop it.
Leaders sometimes become victims of the what’s known as the sunk-cost fallacy. We think that because we have invested so much in a certain project or person that we can’t stop. That’s irrational thinking that I can easily fall victim to, especially when dealing with people-related necessary endings. However, what we have spent is gone, and the decision to proceed must be made based on future investment and return.
It helps to identify kill criteria related to a decision — kill criteria helped me make a couple of “quitting” decisions last year. We had a couple of lines of business that were failing, and I told our team that if we did not reach certain goals in 2023, we would stop investing in those parts of our business. It was a tough decision, but we didn’t meet the goals, so we made the decision to get out of one business and significantly reduce our investment in another. Setting kill criteria was helpful and important in assisting our team to overcome the sunk-cost fallacy related to these decisions.
It also helps to have an infinite mindset. The concept of an infinite mindset was initially developed by James Carse in his 1986 book Finite and Infinite Games. It was recently repopularized by Simon Sinek, a wonderful leadership thought leader. The gist of an infinite mindset is that we need to stay in the game and keep it going, and it helps to do that if we are willing to discard things that are wasting our time and energy.
There are many examples of quitting something in search of a big goal. Jeff Bezos quit a well-paying job as an investment banker to start Amazon as an online bookseller. Mark Cuban quit a stable job as a computer salesman to start his own company, putting him on a path to becoming a billionaire. Bill Gates quit Harvard to start Microsoft. And the person who wrote the book on grit, literally, Angela Duckworth quit a high-profile job as a management consultant to teach seventh-grade math.
Of course, when it’s time to quit, a leader should make sure they are quitting the right thing. One of the best examples of quitting the wrong thing is Sears. In the 1990s, Sears owned a group of profitable financial services companies — Discover, Coldwell Banker, Allstate Insurance, and Dean, Witter, Reynolds — while the retail business was in a death spiral. Sears executives decided to get out of financial services to focus on retail. Today, those previous financial services companies have tremendous combined market value, while the retail business went bankrupt. The Sears team was right to think about quitting, but they horribly misjudged what they should quit.
Quitting can radically improve a leader’s life. It allows the leader to redirect resources, and, perhaps most important, it enables them to get closure on a decision. I cannot recall regretting the decision to quit something, but many times, I have wished I had done it sooner. It is generally a tremendous relief once the decision to stop doing something that is not creating value has been made and executed.
There is potential to be misunderstood here, so I want to close by trying to create as much clarity as possible: Great leaders don’t quit things because they are hard; they quit things that are wasting their time.
Bill Yeargin is president and CEO of Correct Craft and the author of five books, including the best seller Education of a CEO.
