Benjamin Todd

If unsure, quit.

The sunk cost bias leads us to expect people to continue with their current path for too long, want to avoid the short-term costs of switching, and be averse to leaping into an unknown new option.

This all suggests that if you're on the fence about quitting your job, you should quit.

This is exactly what an influential randomized study found.

Stephen Levitt recruited tens of thousands of participants who were deeply unsure about whether to make a big change in their life.

After offering some advice on how to make hard choices, those who remained truly undecided were given the chance to flip a coin to settle the issue.

22,500 did so.

Levitt followed up with these participants two and six months later to ask whether they had actually made the change and how happy they were on a scale of 1 to 10.

Turned out that people who made a change on an important question gained 2.2 points of happiness out of 10.

Of course, this is just one study, and we wouldn't be surprised if the effect were smaller on replication.

But it lines up with what we'd expect.

Apply this to your own career.

In the earlier chapters, you should have made a list of some ideas for longer-term career paths to aim towards.

Now you could start to narrow them down.

1.

Make a rough guess at which longer-term paths are most promising on the balance of impact, personal fit, and job satisfaction.

2.

What are some of your key uncertainties about this ranking?

List out at least five.

3.