Quotes About Resolve

Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.

If you feel like you've got a close call between quitting and persevering, it's likely that quitting is the better choice.

When you are weighing whether to quit something or stick with it, you can't know for sure whether you can succeed at what you're doing because that's probabilistic. But there is a crucial difference between the two choices. Only one choice—the choice to persevere—lets you eventually find out the answer.

Do you want to just let it all out, or are you thinking of what to do about it next?

Contrary to popular belief, quitting will get you to where you want to go faster.

One of the steps to becoming a better quitter is to not accept "I'm not ready to make a decision right now" as a sentence that makes sense. At every moment of your life, you have a choice about whether to stay or whether to go. When you choose to stay, you are also choosing to not go. When you choose to quit, you are also choosing to not continue.

The corollary of this is also true. When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call.

This is consistent with the idea that the scale is gaffed against quitting. It turns out that our psychology puts a thumb on the scale such that by the time we think the options of quitting and sticking are 50-50, it's not even in the vicinity.

Quitting means failing, capitulating, losing. Quitting shows a lack of character. Quitters are losers (except, of course, when it involves giving up something obviously bad like smoking, alcohol, drugs, or an abusive relationship).

Or we don't leave a career we spent years training for, because that would mean our training was for nothing. Or we keep watching a bad movie because of the time we've already spent watching it.

Your friend complains about being in a bad relationship. If you ask, "Why don't you just break up?" they'll frequently say, "Because I've put so much time into trying to make this relationship work.

We have the intuition that when the world tells us our beliefs need updating, when new information conflicts with a belief we have, we will resolve that conflict by changing our belief. But all too often, like the cult members, we rationalize away the new information so we can defend our prior belief and stick to it.

That we make both types of errors, sometimes sticking too long and sometimes giving up too early, shouldn't be that surprising because whether to stick or quit aren't separate decisions. They are one and the same. Whenever you choose to stick, you are, by definition, not quitting. The reverse is true when you choose to quit.

Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early, and the usually part is specifically when you're in the losses.

Essentially, kill criteria create a precommitment contract to quit.

quoting an August 2005 speech by then president George W. Bush justifying staying the course in Iraq by saying, "We owe [the two thousand soldiers who had already died] something. We will finish the task that they gave their lives for."); Van Putten, Zeelenberg, and Van Dijk, "Who Throws Good Money after Bad?," 2010, 33 ("one of the most important reasons to continue the way in Iraq was to prevent acknowledging that soldiers who fell in battle died in vain").

Hope is putting faith to work when doubting would be easier.

We won't make a drama out of a crisis.

I may not be the strongest. I may not be the fastest. But I'll be damned if I'm not trying my hardest.

You have a choice. You can throw in the towel, or you can use it to wipe the sweat off of your face.

With any project there's one or two things that you really want to do and that's going to crack it.

I think at the beginning of a project, you decide if you're in love with the idea and what it's about, or what you think it's about at that time at least. Then you commit to it, and once you've commit to it no matter what, no matter how many self doubts you have, you're in it. The ship's sailed, you can't turn around.

All I can promise is I'll do my very best. I'll try as hard as I can.

All I can ever promise is that I will do my very best.