“A quitter never wins and a winner never quits.” In 1937, a self-help pundit named Napoleon Hill included that phrase in his very popular book Think and Grow Rich. Hill was inspired in part by the rags-to-riches industrialist Andrew Carnegie. These days the phrase is often attributed to Vince Lombardi, the legendarily tough football coach. What a lineage! And it does make a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Of course it takes tremendous amounts of time and effort and, for lack of a more scientific word, stick-to-itiveness, to make any real progress in the world. But time and effort and even stick-to-itiveness are not in infinite supply. Remember the opportunity cost: every hour, every ounce of effort you spend here cannot be spent there. So let me counter Napoleon Hill’s phrase with another one, certainly not as well known. It’s something that Stella Adler, the great acting coach, used to say: Your choice is your talent. So choosing the right path, the right project, the right job or passion or religion — that’s where the treasure lies; that’s where the value lies. So if you realize that you’ve made a wrong choice — even if already you’ve sunk way too much cost into it — well, I’ve got one word to say to you, my friend. Quit.
There is a problem solving perspective in which one is searching a tree of sub-goals. Nodes that are a conjunction of sub-goals are straight forward. You have to solve all the sub-goals, so if you get stuck on one of them you mustn't quit.
Nodes that are a disjunction of sub-goals are much harder to manage. Sometimes the problem is solvable (because, say, the 10th sub-goal is solvable) but the first 9 sub-goals are insoluble. You cannot solve the problem without quitting on nine of the sub-goals (or quitting on your original choice of search order).
Life often throws you problems that you cannot solve if you refuse to quit (from failing sub-goals). Sometimes, taking the attitude that "a winner never quits" guarantees failure.
VENKATESH: So one of the strange things we found out when we spoke to baseball players is that they have their own language for quitting. They actually quit. They just don’t call it that. They don’t call it quitting. They don’t call it giving up. But, they say, “You know what? I’m just going to shut it down for a while.”
VENKATESH: So, what does it mean to be a quitter as opposed to a “shutter downer”?
HALL: Probably the same thing, is just sounds better when you say ‘I’m just shutting down.’ You know, it’s like you’re not really doing it, but, you know, you are.
“A quitter never wins and a winner never quits.” In 1937, a self-help pundit named Napoleon Hill included that phrase in his very popular book Think and Grow Rich. Hill was inspired in part by the rags-to-riches industrialist Andrew Carnegie. These days the phrase is often attributed to Vince Lombardi, the legendarily tough football coach. What a lineage! And it does make a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Of course it takes tremendous amounts of time and effort and, for lack of a more scientific word, stick-to-itiveness, to make any real progress in the world. But time and effort and even stick-to-itiveness are not in infinite supply. Remember the opportunity cost: every hour, every ounce of effort you spend here cannot be spent there. So let me counter Napoleon Hill’s phrase with another one, certainly not as well known. It’s something that Stella Adler, the great acting coach, used to say: Your choice is your talent. So choosing the right path, the right project, the right job or passion or religion — that’s where the treasure lies; that’s where the value lies. So if you realize that you’ve made a wrong choice — even if already you’ve sunk way too much cost into it — well, I’ve got one word to say to you, my friend. Quit.