We as humans tend to think about waste as a backward looking problem when it's really a forward looking problem, right? I don't want to quit now because I'll have wasted my time. We know that once we started to invest capital in something, that capital itself is going to make it hard for us to walk away. So let's just call that broadly capital. And capital isn't just money. It can be your time and attention and effort, right? Yeah. The geek in me comes out occasionally. Exactly. Because you've got your Monte Carlo simulation, right? Because you have all these people who've done it before you. And man, if you're not paying attention
Annie Duke is angry that quitting gets such a bad rap. Instead of our relentless focus on grit and "going for it," the former professional poker player, decision strategist, and author of Quit wants us to recognize the costs associated with sticking to a losing outcome. Listen as she explains to EconTalk host Russ Roberts how society's conflation of grit with character has made quitting unnecessarily hard, and why our desire for certainty harms our decision-making ability. Additional topics include the flawed mental accounting that makes us confuse wins for losses, what we can learn from ants, and the tragic story of how the refusal to quit cost 16 lives one terrible night at the top of Mt. Everest.