From Annie Duke’s “Quit”
Create a “Kill” Criteria with a date before you start a project.
“We already know that we’re not particularly good at responding rationally in the moment to signals that tell us that we ought to quit. In fact, we tend to react to bad news by increasing our commitment rather than cutting our losses. Just knowing about the problem doesn’t help, nor does the Jedi mind trick of saying, “What if I imagine coming to this decision fresh?”
But there is something that can help. If we can identify in advance what the signals are that we should pay attention to and make a plan for how we will react to them, we can increase the chances that we’ll cut our losses when we ought to. Essentially, when you enter into an endeavor, you want to imagine what you could find out that would tell you it’s no longer worth pursuing. Ask yourself, “What are the signs that, if I see them in the future, will cause me to exit the road I’m on? What could I learn about the state of the world or the state of myself that would change my commitment to this decision?” That list offers you a set of kill criteria, literally criteria for killing a project or changing your mind or cutting your losses. It’s one of the best tools for helping you figure out when to quit closer to on time.” (p. 115)
“The best quitting criteria combine two things: a state and a date. A state is just what it sounds like, an objective, measurable condition you or your project is in, a benchmark that you have hit or missed. A date is the when. Kill criteria, generally, include both states and dates, in the form of “If I am (or am not) in a particular state at a particular date or at a particular time, then I have to quit.” Or “If I haven’t done X by Y (time), I’ll quit.” Or “If I haven’t achieved X by the time I’ve spent Y (amount in money, effort, time, or other resources), I should quit.” For mParticle, one of the kill criteria was a lack of a decision-maker in the room, triggering an offer of executive alignment for the next meeting. Translated into states and dates, “If I can’t get an executive in the room (the state) by the next meeting (the date), then I’ll kill the deal.” (p. 122)
Examples
- “your kill criteria could be in the form of a loss limit where, if you had to personally contribute additional money to keep the stores going (or contribute beyond a certain amount), you would sell or close the business.”
- “In the case of Glitch, a kill criterion might be if you haven’t reached a certain number of sticky customers by a particular date, you’ll quit.”
- “To avoid becoming entrapped, set benchmarks, in the form of states and dates, in advance. Find out the average time it takes a newly minted PhD to secure a tenure-track position and circle that date on the calendar as a quitting deadline. If, for example, that’s four years from the time you get your PhD, then if you haven’t secured a tenure-track position (the state) within four years (the date), you ought to quit.” (p. 124)
- “Given the California bullet train, you can imagine a lot of applicable kill criteria, like quitting if your original projected budget has more than tripled.”
- “He gave two examples of the criteria that would cause them to kill the mission. If at any point they fell an hour behind schedule, they would abort. Or, if they discovered that, at any time up to 50% of the way to bin Laden’s compound, they had been detected and compromised by the Pakistani government, they would turn around. If they were compromised beyond the 50% mark, that would be a command decision McRaven would have to make on the fly.” (p. 123)
- One of the clearest examples of a kill criterion is the turnaround time on Everest. If you haven’t made it to the summit by 1 p.m., you cannot safely descend to Camp 4 before dark, so you must abandon the climb.” (p. 116)
- “”You can set kill criteria before you accept a position at a company, or before you decide on your major or what college you’re going to, or the house that you want to buy, or the place that you want to live. When you’re shelling out money for a concert ticket, you can think about what the weather conditions would have to be for you to eat the cost and stay home. Kill criteria work well for investing in the market. Setting a stop-loss or a take-gain are examples of kill criteria, but you could also set criteria more broadly, asking yourself in advance what the signals in the market might be that would cause you to change your investment strategy.”
- “When you start dating someone, think ahead. What could be happening that would make you think that it was time to end the relationship?”
- “Or, in the case of a single date, what would make you want to end the date?”
- “You could do that with going to a particular college, picking a major, starting a career, or taking a job.”
- “An obvious and high-value application of kill criteria has to do with funnel management for a business’s sales function. A big problem for sellers is managing all the opportunities at the top of the funnel: Which do you pursue? And, once you’ve started pursuing a lead, when do you give up on it?” (p. 117)
- “Or, in the extreme case, it could be that trusted advisers are telling you to abandon course, like if your best friend and lawyer switches sides in a lawsuit.”
“A sales professional’s time is a valuable and limited resource. Any time spent on a low-value lead is time they can’t spend on higher-value leads, or developing new opportunities. That means that if they don’t quickly identify and quit the likely dead ends, that is what will, in reality, slow progress. Creating a set of kill criteria would help the team to cut their losses faster when the signs were clear. To develop such criteria, we started by working with the sales team to generate a list of signals that would tell them that an opportunity wasn’t worth pursuing. To do that, we sent out the following prompt to the sellers and the sales leadership: Imagine you were pursuing a lead that came through an RFP (request for proposal) or RFI (request for information). It’s six months from now, and you have lost the deal. Looking back, you realize there were early signals that the deal was not going to close. What were they? In general, this idea of casting yourself into the future, imagining a failure, and then looking back to try to figure out why is called a premortem. Using a premortem is a great tool to help develop high-quality kill criteria.” (p. 119)
“This particular prompt targeted the early signals of failure that the sellers (and all of us) tend to overlook, rationalize, or ignore. In other words, we were looking for the kinds of indicators of things not going well that intuitively we should pay attention to, but don’t.” (p. 119)
Other Good Quotes:
“This is in line with lots of subsequent work that’s been done on all sorts of precommitment contracts. Whether it comes to following through with diet plans or work plans or study plans, these types of precommitment contracts get people to act more rationally. Essentially, kill criteria create a precommitment contract to quit. Funnel Vision You can likely imagine lots of applications of kill criteria in your personal life.
“You can set kill criteria before you accept a position at a company, or before you decide on your major or what college you’re going to, or the house that you want to buy, or the place that you want to live. When you’re shelling out money for a concert ticket, you can think about what the weather conditions would have to be for you to eat the cost and stay home. Kill criteria work well for investing in the market. Setting a stop-loss or a take-gain are examples of kill criteria, but you could also set criteria more broadly, asking yourself in advance what the signals in the market might be that would cause you to change your investment strategy. The good news about kill criteria is that you haven’t missed your chance to set them once you have already started an endeavor. At any point, no matter whether it comes to someone you are dating or a house you already own or an investment you are in or a college you are attending, you can think about some time frame in the future, imagine you are unhappy with your situation, and identify the benchmarks you will have missed or the signals you will be seeing that will tell you that you ought to walk away. You may not have set a stop-loss or take-gain when you bought a stock but you can set one now.” (p. 121)
“The importance of thinking about states and dates in setting kill criteria in advance has been developed and tested in situations with the highest possible stakes, affecting large numbers of people and gigantic, world-changing decisions. But the concepts are broadly applicable to your personal decisions, where you are trying to spend your resources on things that matter and avoid pedestal-building when you ought to be quitting.” (p. 123)
“You can apply states and dates to relationships. If your goal is marriage (or an equivalent long-term commitment), then if your relationship partner hasn’t proposed (or accepted your proposal or otherwise demonstrated a long-term commitment) by a certain date, you should move on and find someone who is as excited about committing to you as you are to them. You can do the same for career advancement. If you’re working at an entry-level position that has some prospect for advancement, figure out as early as you can the interim milestones for those who succeed, whether it’s raises, or initial promotions, or additional responsibilities, or whatever is specific in that company or practice. Get information about when others who’ve succeeded got those signals on the way up and include those states and dates in your kill criteria.” (p. 125)
“Second, when you set out clear kill criteria in advance and make a precommitment to walk away when you see those signals, you are just more likely to follow through, even when you are losing. Anytime you can make a decision about cutting your losses in advance, you’ll do better at closing those mental accounts.” (p. 127)
“In large part, we are what we do, and our identity is closely connected with whatever we’re focused on, including our careers, relationships, projects, and hobbies. When we quit any of those things, we have to deal with the prospect of quitting part of our identity. And that is painful.” (p. 132)
“To anybody who thinks they can be objective about quitting decisions, the results of the field studies in major professional sports should be super alarming. You’ve got smart people, a data-rich environment, a tight feedback loop, and a lot of motivation. For most of the quitting decisions we make, we have much less information and we have longer, noisier feedback loops.” (p. 149)
“You’ve probably heard people (including yourself), when thinking about taking a new path, say, “I don’t want to make a decision right now.” You likely accepted that as a reasonable thing to say. But once you step back and think about it, you realize that deciding not to change is itself a decision. At any moment, when you’re pursuing a goal, you are choosing to either stay on the path you’re on or change course. Sticking with the path is as much of a decision as choosing to quit. In fact, the decision about whether to stay or go is by definition the same choice.” (p. 152)
“Advance planning and precommitment contracts increase the chances you will quit sooner. When you enter into a course of action, create a set of kill criteria. This is a list of signals you might see in the future that would tell you it’s time to quit. Kill criteria will help inoculate you against bad decision-making when you’re “in it” by limiting the number of decisions you’ll have to make once you’re already in the gains or in the losses.” (p. 128)
“What does Conway do to counter these vehement arguments? Nothing. He agrees with them that they can make it work. He doesn’t try to convince the founders that they’re wrong. Instead, he asks them what success would look like over the next few months. And he asks them for specifics. That conversation allows him to sit down with the founder and set performance benchmarks that would signal that the company was heading in the right direction. Then, they agree when to revisit those benchmarks and, if the venture is falling short, to have a serious discussion about shutting it down. This probably sounds a lot like Conway is using kill criteria, and that’s because he is. The founder comes away from the conversation believing they’ve convinced Conway they can turn it around. Conway’s opinion, you’ve probably guessed, hasn’t changed. He comes away still believing that if the founder could see what he sees, they would shut the endeavor down that day. But he knows it’s generally futile to try to persuade them right then. Having set these kill criteria, which the founder has helped generate, Conway has markedly increased the probability that, when they revisit the issue, the founder will be able to see past their own biases and come to the right decision.” (p. 182)
“Instead, when someone comes to you, it’s better to use Ron Conway’s approach, which can be summarized in these four steps. STEP 1 | Let them know that you think they should consider quitting. STEP 2 | When they push back, retreat and agree with them that they can turn the situation around. STEP 3 | Set very clear definitions around what success is going to look like in the near future and memorialize them down as kill criteria. STEP 4 | Agree to revisit the conversation and, if the benchmarks for success haven’t been met, you’ll have a serious discussion about quitting. Implicit in steps 3 and 4 is that the person you’re counseling has now given you permission to speak freely and bluntly about abandoning course. Of course, all the while, you should remind them that life’s too short.” (p. 195)
“One of the goals for all of us should be to, as much as possible, maximize the diversification of interests, skills, and opportunities in each of our portfolios. There are all sorts of ways you can execute on that in your own life. For example, in your job, it’s a good idea to explore other functions by asking to participate in any onboardings or trainings that might be available to you, as long as that doesn’t have a negative effect on the work you’re primarily responsible for. Exploring those other functions benefits you in several ways. It will maximize the number of jobs that you’re qualified for and it allows you to sample other careers you might not have otherwise considered. Then, if your job goes away for some reason, you will have more things that you can move on to.” (p. 222)
“An “unless” is a powerful thing. Adding a few well-thought-out unlesses to our goals will help us achieve the flexibility that we’re seeking, be more responsive to the changing landscape, and reduce escalation of commitment to losing causes. “I’m going to pursue this lead unless I can’t get an executive in the room.” “I’m going to stay in my job unless I have to consistently take my work home or I find myself dreading the start of the workday and that feeling persists.” “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.” “I’m going to continue to run this marathon unless I break a bone.” This is why having kill criteria is so important. When you set a goal, creating a list of kill criteria gives you the unlesses that you need to be more rational about when it’s the right time to walk away. Those kill criteria could be about what the world is signaling to you, like observing behavior that tells you that your boss is toxic, or interest rates are rising, or a fog is rolling in, or there’s an onset of a pandemic. Or they could be about changes in yourself, whether it’s the pain you might feel that precedes your fibula snapping or, as in my case, an illness you’ve been struggling with becoming acute. Or it could just be that your preferences change or that the things you value evolve. That a job in the service industry is no longer for you. Or that the sport you used to love now makes you miserable. 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. Doing this work with a quitting coach who can hold you accountable to those unlesses is even better.” (p. 238)