How to Know if You Should Quit |
Almost everyone quits right before things start working. And they don't even realize it.
The story we tell about quitting is too simple. It usually comes packaged as a moral: Winners never quit; quitters never win. Or its contrarian cousin: Know when to walk away; sunk costs are for suckers.
Both slogans are tidy. Both are wrong in the ways that matter most.
Here's what most people actually struggle with: quitting too soon.
I've spent two decades studying behavior: Why do people stick with habits that hurt them? Why do they abandon goals that could help them? And over and over, I see the same pattern: People mistake the signal of progress for the feeling of progress. When effort starts to feel heavy, boring, or discouraging, they assume the strategy isn't working. They confuse discomfort with failure. So they quit—often at the exact moment persistence would have paid off.
There's a famous experiment that illustrates this. Researchers placed rats in a cylinder of water. With no apparent escape, the animals initially swam for a short time before giving up. But when the researchers intervened, briefly rescuing the rats and then placing them back into the water, the animals swam far longer on the second attempt. What changed wasn't the water. It wasn't the rats' physical ability. It was their belief. The expectation of rescue altered how long they endured.
Hope didn't make the task easier. Hope made endurance possible.
This finding has been repeated across psychology and