Quotes About Commitment

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you.

The dedicated life is the life worth living. You must give with your whole heart.

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

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.

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.

Quitting is hard, too hard to do entirely on our own. We as individuals are riddled by the host of biases, like the sunk cost fallacy, endowment effect, status quo bias, and loss aversion, which lead to escalation of commitment. Our identities are entwined in the things that we're doing. Our instinct is to want to protect that identity, making us stick to things even more.

The status quo represents a mental account that we already have open, which has sunk costs associated with it, the time, money, or effort that has already been put into the way we've been doing things. Closing that account by switching to a new option can make us feel like we are wasting those resources we have already spent. We also become endowed to the status quo, taking ownership of the decisions that have kept us in that groove and anything we have created along the way.

The endowment and sunk cost effects live together in a way that amplifies escalation of commitment. Status quo bias adds to the mix of cognitive forces gaffing the scale.

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.

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).

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'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.

I'm going to keep developing this product unless I fail to hit clear benchmarks within the next two months that I've set with my quitting coach.

To make these unlesses most effective, we need to create strong precommitment contracts that set out how we're going to follow through on those kill criteria. Then, to make sure that we're picking the unlesses that are going to get us to the fastest answer about whether the thing we're doing is worth pursuing, we need to do the work of identifying monkeys and pedestals.

No matter how far we get from the familiarity of betting at a poker table or in a casino, our decisions are always bets. We routinely decide among alternatives, put resources at risk, assess the likelihood of different outcomes, and consider what it is that we value. Every decision commits us to some course of action that, by definition, eliminates acting on other alternatives. Not placing a bet on something is, itself, a bet.

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.

When your identity is what you do, then what you do becomes hard to abandon, because it means quitting who you are.

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.

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.