Quotes About Perseverance

What is true for grit is true for optimism. Optimism gets you to stick to things that are worthwhile. But optimism also gets you to stick to things that are no longer worthwhile. And life's too short to do that.

Quit and grit are two sides of the exact same decision. Decision-making in the real world requires action without complete information. Quitting is the tool that allows us to react to new information that is revealed after we make a decision.

Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress.

If we find the Achilles' heel," Teller told me, "thank God we found the Achilles' heel after $2 million instead of after $20 million.

Monkeys and pedestals boils down to some very good advice: Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress.

Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early. If you quit on time, it's not going to seem like anything particularly dire is happening at that particular moment.

Poker teaches that lesson. A great poker player who has a good-size advantage over the other players at the table, making significantly better strategic decisions, will still be losing over 40% of the time at the end of eight hours of play. That's a whole lot of wrong. And it's not just confined to poker.

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.

That's why, if I had to skill somebody up to get them to be a better decision-maker, quitting is the primary skill I would choose, because the option to quit is what allows you to react to that changing landscape.

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).

The English language itself favors grit, describing those who persevere with positive terms like can-do, unwavering, steadfast, resolute, daring, audacious, undaunting, gutsy, and hardy. Or as having backbone, pluck, mettle, tenacity, or stick-to-itiveness.

Exacerbating the pass-fail problem is that once we establish a goal, we rarely revisit it. Goals tend to be set-it-and-forget-it. The finish line doesn't move.

Our track to nowhere could be refusing to quit our college major even though it's making us unhappy, because we already took so many classes and put so much time into it.

I think that we all share the intuition that the latter case would feel worse, even though that version of you trained for distance running and actually ran 16 miles of a 26.2-mile race, compared with the version of you that never got off the couch. The reason it feels worse is that if you don't try, if you never start the race, there is no failing to reach the finish line because you never set that as a goal for yourself in the first place.

I'm certainly not knocking these books. But whether you say "pivot" or "moving on to the next chapter" or "strategic redeployment," all of these things are, by definition, quitting. After all, stripped of its negative connotation, quitting is merely the choice to stop something that you have started.

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.

There is a rich universe of science studying the human tendency to persevere too long, particularly in the face of bad news.

Finish lines are funny things. You either reach them or you don't. You either succeed or you fail. There is no in between. Progress along the way matters very little.

But just because there are a lot of benefits to setting goals doesn't mean that there isn't a downside to them as well. As you might already suspect, clearly defined finish lines should come with a warning: Danger, you may experience escalation of commitment.

Be picky about what you stick to. Persevere in the things that matter, that bring you happiness, and that move you toward your goals. Quit everything else, to free up those resources so you can pursue your goals and stop sticking to things that slow you down.

As you already know, grit is good for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, but grit also gets you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile.