Making the Hard Decision of When to Quit
When you’ve embarked on a serious, ambitious effort—especially one that was a major life goal—it’s hard to think that one day you might want to stop, that it no longer serves your original purpose.
It could be a relationship, a hobby, entrepreneurial endeavor or a career.
Having often thought about where to go with SuperViva, the conundrum currently facing Pandora, an awesome online radio service, really struck me:
“At the moment we think this problem in Washington is not going to get solved,” Pandora’s founder Tim Westergren told the Post, “we have to pull the plug because all we’re doing is wasting money.”
What about rallying for donations from the public ala Wikipedia?
Or from Apple, on whose iPhone Pandora is an extremely popular application?
Or maybe it’s just gotten so exhausting that the Pandora team wants to quit?
While in the midst of my own backs and forths on where to go with SuperViva, someone gave me The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
It took only about an hour or two to read and instigated some useful critical thinking. You’ll find such nuggets of wisdom as:
- Quit the wrong stuff. Stick with the right stuff. Have the guts to do one or the other.
- [Strategic] quitting is not the same as failing..Quitting smart is a great way to avoid failing.
- Quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you up to excel at something else.
I highly recommend The Dip as well as these other books if you’re struggling with a big decision on which way to go, whether in business or your personal life:
