Determine the conditions to quit before you start

Perseverance is a wonderful trait to have. If you can fight through obstacles to reach your goal, that’s an amazing thing to do.

At times, though, people will keep pushing at a dead end, and end up wasting time that could be put toward other ventures instead. The difference can be very hard to spot when you’re in it, so determining those conditions ahead of time can help.

In David Epstein’s book “ Range “, he says:

“We fail…tasks we don’t have the guts to quit.”…knowing when to quit is such a strategic advantage that every single person, before undertaking an endeavor should enumerate conditions under which they should quit.”

Not just quitting

This applies to more than just quitting. As I heard recently on the Businessology Show, they talked about how almost no company wished they had waited longer to let people go. Instead, if they had trimmed their staff earlier it would have lead to healthier company for the remaining staff. It’s a difficult thing to do, particularly in the moment, so having the conditions determined ahead of time can be very helpful.

This is something that we’ve done a bit of work on at GreenMellen, but likely not enough. When COVID first started ramping up, Ali and I spent some time calculating our…