You Don't Have to Quit, but You Can.

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Annie Duke: For many things that you choose to quit, you can go back. She says quitting is closing a door and sealing it shut but there's usually something on the other side. "No matter what your circumstances are, if you can create one more option for yourself, you can be a little bit more like your life will be better," she says.

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.