Annie Duke

Yeah, and there's recent research that actually shows that when people are struggling with a really hard decision, if you have them go give advice to somebody else who's struggling with the same decision, it helps them with their own decision.

There's something about, as you just said, like giving advice to somebody else, it's not your struggle anymore.

And that allows you to see it so much more clearly.

You know, once we start something, we think that stopping it is like a failure.

It's a sign of being weak-willed.

Like we all know that grit is a sign of character and we should stick it out and show our metal, right?

We should be courageous and keep going.

But there's so much science that shows that we don't quit things soon enough.

And I think that one of the ways that I can get at that, Mike, is like, think about some big decisions that you've made where you did finally quit something.

As you think about that set of decisions, would you say that for the most part, after you finally quit, you think, oh, I should have done that a lot earlier?

Or for the most part, do you think, woo, I did that too soon?

Right.

And I think that that's true for most people is that we feel like, oh, I wish I had done that earlier.

And I think the problem is that kind of to the point of what we were talking about before about wanting to get to that certainty before you're willing to make a decision.

is that once we start things, we don't want to quit unless we're certain that we have to.

Because it does feel like such a failure to us to actually walk away from something, right?

That we don't want to walk away from it unless we know that we didn't have any other choice.

But if we didn't have any other choice, that's way past the point that you should have walked away.

So I think that people need to get better at saying like, look, when I make a decision to start something,

I'm giving it my best guess as to whether I'm going to like this job, for example.