What will you give up in 2023?

Happy New Year!

This is the reverse of the kind of blog post that normally gets posted around the turn of the year. It stems from a very interesting conversation I read on Freakonomics a few weeks back, with Annie Duke, a former professional poker player and cognitive behavioural scientist who wrote a book about quitting.

Do you need a sign to stop?

In conversation with Steven Levitt, Annie Duke discussed both why we don't quit things that we should quit, and why we should probably quit more things generally. I really liked her approach, as someone who sometimes struggles with the twin drags of inertia and a sense of duty that have both kept me in situations that I stopped enjoying and sometimes started to actively dislike. 

Annie Duke describes being able to quit as "a gift", which is a positive way of looking at things. 

"...for most decisions we make, we know very little. And I think we all have that feeling, probably every day, of I wish I knew then what I’d known now... the good news for us is that when we do find out this new information that, hey, things aren’t really going our way. Or I found out this new information that would’ve made me make a different choice in the first place, we can quit what we’re doing and go do something else...  it’s the thing that makes, really, decision making under uncertainty bearable. But I don’t think we appreciate that gift."

I remember a conversation with my Dad when he was talking about various projects in his church and he commented that people are very good at starting things but not very good at finishing them. Last year the trustees at my Mum's church decided that it was becoming unviable and made the bold move to close the church down before it dwindled any further. I feel that took a certain sense of courage, particularly bearing in mind that comment from my Dad that stuck with me. 

Quitting isn't easy. I changed jobs last year and went into a tricky situation that took several months to resolve. I was asked by several friends if I felt I had made the wrong decision to change jobs. I said a few times that I still wasn't sure about the new job, but I had no regrets about moving on from my previous job. It was time for me to quit and move on. 

Happily, the new job improved massively towards the end of the year. But what if it hadn't? Annie Duke has some advice there too, about identifying the excellently-named "kill criteria". I am going to build these into various future work projects and probably in my personal life as well.

"One of the best ways to become better at quitting is to think in advance. There’s some pretty deep scientific work... [by] Barry Staw that says, “When we get signals from the world that the path we’re on is not working out, that we ought to quit what we’re doing, we don’t actually pay attention.” ...when we get those negative signals, we’ll escalate our commitment to the losing cause. In other words, we’ll double down and triple down on the path or the goal that we’re trying to pursue for a variety of reasons. One of which would be, we don’t want to feel like we wasted our time up until this moment." [That's sunk cost bias - a powerful psychological force I've blogged about before!]

"So if we know that we’re not going to pay attention to the signals, one of the things we can do is as much as we possibly can, determine those signals in advance... What are the signals that I’m going to be seeing that would tell me that I ought to walk away, that things aren’t going well? And we write down a list of those signals and we call those “kill criteria”. Doing that advanced work will actually get you to be much more likely to pay attention to them and quit earlier than you otherwise would have, which is really good for you. ‘Cause if things aren’t going well, you want to quit as quickly as possible so that you can go do something that would be better."

Annie Duke talks about "states and dates" - in other words, the "kill criteria" needs to have a state and a date so if you aren't in the state you want to be by the date you set, then you quit. You can have as many benchmarks and deadlines as you like, but the important thing is that doing this means you limit the amount of time you waste chasing a lost cause. The reason we chase those lost causes is quite simple - misplaced hope!

"The reason why kill criteria need to have a date, you need a timestamp, a deadline, is because as long as there’s hope, there’s always some chance we can turn it around. And that moment where we go from failing to having failed is so horrific for us as humans that we’ll just keep going until we’re certain that we had no other choice.

And as a final note, Annie says:

"If you quit on time, meaning at the objectively right moment, it will feel like you quit too early — usually."

So, the lesson seems to be to set the "kill criteria" and then accept them when it becomes clear that we aren't going to achieve what we want to achieved.

Know when to go

So, what am I going to quit in 2023? Is there anything with kill criteria? I've thought about this, and generally I am pretty happy going into this new year. I'm definitely feeling happier than I was at the start of 2022. But anything new is going to have kill criteria built in, and I'm going to be mindful to things that aren't working and make positive decisions to quit well before the point where all hope is lost. I feel that will be better for me in the long run.

And, on that note, an announcement. After a decade, I think this forthcoming Annual Christmas Card Audit will be the last ACCA. I may change my mind, but I feel it is time to quit. (There will still be a "favourite Christmas cards" post in future years, don't worry!)

All quotes taken from 'Annie Duke Thinks You Should Quit' on Freakonomics.