Most of what we tell each other about perseverance is a single story. Don’t give up. Keep going. Winners never quit. The person who made it through the hard patch, who stuck it out when others were leaving, is celebrated in every inspirational speech, corporate poster and sporting anthem. Quitting, by implication, is what losers do.
It’s a comforting story, but it’s not really how the research on successful lives looks. A growing body of work suggests that our culture has a serious asymmetry in how it treats quitting — we over-honour the people who persevered through to success, and we systematically fail to notice the ones who persevered past the point where quitting would have been wiser. The second group is, statistically, much larger. We just don’t hear from them, because they’re still stuck.
The poker player who studied giving up
The writer Annie Duke — whose earlier career was in professional poker, where she made a living partly by folding at the right moments — spent the years after leaving the game studying the decision science of quitting. Her 2022 book Quit drew together research from several traditions and landed on an uncomfortable conclusion: we quit too late, far more often than we quit too early, and the systematic bias has real costs.
The problem, Duke argues, is that the forces keeping us in bad situations are well-understood by psychology: loss aversion (already documented by Kahneman and Tversky) makes us cling to what we have; sunk-cost thinking tells us we’ve already invested too much to walk away; the status-quo bias makes continuing feel lower-risk than changing; and the cultural praise for grit puts a moral gloss on what is often just stubbornness. All four push us in the same direction, and they push hard.
What we don’t have, correspondingly, is a cultural framework or vocabulary for the wisdom of walking away. When someone leaves a career, a relationship, a project, or a place, the default question we ask them is “what went wrong?” — as if continuing had been the natural default. The equally reasonable question — “what took you so long?” — almost never gets asked.
The coin-flip experiment
One of the most striking pieces of research on this came from the economist Steven Levitt, of Freakonomics fame, in collaboration with a team at the University of Chicago. Levitt built a website where people who were genuinely stuck on a life decision — should I quit my job? should I leave my partner? should I sell my house? — could come and, if willing, have the decision decided by a coin flip. The website then followed up with participants six months later and again at two months, asking about their happiness.
Almost 25,000 people took part. Levitt’s finding was uncomfortable and fascinating. People who quit — who made the change — reported being happier, on average, at both follow-ups, than people who stayed. The effect was strongest for the most agonised decisions: the ones where participants said they’d been going back and forth for months or years, unable to choose.
You have to be careful with this finding. It’s correlational; the people who let a coin flip decide may have been different from those who didn’t. But the result has held up under reanalysis, and it converges with other research suggesting that people stuck in extended indecision tend, when they do eventually move, to be glad they did.
What the grit literature says — with caveats
This is where honesty matters, because the picture isn’t one-sided. The psychologist Angela Duckworth’s research on grit, covered more fully in another article in this series, has consistently found that perseverance in the face of difficulty predicts success in many domains — school, military training, sales, long-term projects. Staying with things when they get hard is often how mastery develops, relationships deepen, and meaningful work gets done. Duckworth’s research isn’t wrong, and dismissing it would miss a real finding.
But Duckworth’s work also contains a caveat that often gets lost in the popular retellings. Grit predicts success conditional on being on the right trajectory in the first place. Gritty people who stay in domains they should have left aren’t exhibiting grit in the useful sense — they’re exhibiting a costly stubbornness. The research doesn’t say that all perseverance is virtuous. It says that perseverance is one ingredient among many, and that it interacts with whether you’re working on the right thing.
Duke and Duckworth, interestingly, agree more than they disagree. Duckworth herself has spoken publicly about the importance of strategic quitting. The question isn’t whether to be gritty or flexible — it’s how to tell the difference between “this is hard because mastery is hard” (stay) and “this is hard because it’s the wrong path” (go).
The Wrzesniewski refinement
A useful third angle comes from the Yale organisational psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski, whose work on job crafting suggests that quitting is often a blunt instrument when a sharper one is available. Her research has found that workers who are dissatisfied with their jobs don’t have to choose between staying miserably and leaving entirely. A third option — staying but actively reshaping how you do the job, what you focus on, who you work with — often produces better outcomes than either.
This matters because many apparent “quit or stay” decisions are actually “quit, stay, or adjust” decisions, and people don’t always see the third option. A marriage can be adjusted rather than ended. A job can be redesigned rather than abandoned. A field can be approached differently rather than exited. Sometimes the answer to “should I quit?” turns out to be “you should stop doing this particular version of the thing, not the thing itself”.
Wrzesniewski’s research suggests the question to ask, before the big quit, is: have I actually tried to change how I engage with this? If the answer is no, there may be room to craft the situation before giving up on it. If the answer is yes and the crafting didn’t work, quitting is more likely to be the right move.
The counter-thread from long-term relationships
Not every domain rewards strategic quitting the same way. Research on long-term marriages — particularly John Gottman’s decades of work at his Seattle laboratory — consistently finds that couples who stayed through periods of real unhappiness often report, years later, being glad they did. The hard patches weren’t always signs of fundamental incompatibility. Sometimes they were the passage through a life stage, the aftermath of a specific stressor, or a period when one partner was going through something hard and temporarily unavailable.
Gottman’s research doesn’t say all struggling marriages should stay together. It says that our in-the-moment judgement of whether a relationship is salvageable is often wrong — heavily shaped by whatever’s happening in the current week rather than the longer trajectory. The lesson is that for decisions with large inertia and significant externalities (children, shared lives, complex unwindings), the threshold for quitting should probably be higher than for decisions you could reverse quickly.
This is compatible with Duke’s work. She’s not arguing for snap quitting. She’s arguing that the direction of error in most people’s lives is too-late, not too-early. For most decisions, most of the time, most people are on the stubborn side of the distribution. For a few decisions — particularly relationships, long-term projects, and slow-building expertise — the opposite may be true.
What to ask before you quit
Duke and other researchers have converged on a few practical questions worth asking before any major quit.
The first: if I wasn’t already in this, would I choose to join it today? This cuts through the sunk-cost trap. The years you’ve invested are gone either way. The only question is whether what’s ahead is worth doing from where you are now.
The second: what would I do instead, and is it actually better? Many people quit without knowing what they’re heading toward, and then spend years regretting it. Quitting to something is usually better than quitting from something, and if you don’t know what you’d do next, that’s worth resolving before the quit, not after.
The third: have I given this the version that actually tests it? If you’ve been doing a half-hearted version, quitting doesn’t tell you much — you haven’t really tested the real thing. If you’ve given it your serious attempt and it’s still not working, the quit has more information behind it.
The fourth, and perhaps most important: who’s telling me not to quit, and what are their incentives? People around you often have stakes in your not quitting — employers, institutions, family members, partners, even friends who’ve invested in your trajectory. Their advice may be genuinely meant but not neutral. The advice that most closely matches your own instincts, from people who don’t gain from your staying, is usually the most trustworthy.
The question that remains
The honest answer to “should I quit?” is almost always: it depends. Depends on whether you’ve tested the real version. Depends on what you’d do instead. Depends on whether you can craft rather than quit. Depends on whether the difficulty is temporary or structural. Depends on what you’ll think in ten years when the feeling of being stuck has dissolved into something clearer.
What’s probably true, for most people reading this, is that they are closer to under-quitting than to over-quitting. Our cultural defaults push us that way. Our cognitive biases push us that way. The gravitational pull of the status quo pushes us that way. If you’ve been going back and forth about whether to quit something for more than a year, the probabilities suggest the answer is probably yes. Not definitely. But probably.
The question worth carrying, for whatever situation you’re stuck in right now:
If a coin flip decided it for you, which outcome would you secretly hope for? That secret hope is often the answer. You just haven’t given yourself permission to say it yet.
Key research referenced: Annie Duke, Quit (2022); Steven Levitt’s coin-flip experiment (NBER Working Paper, 2016); Angela Duckworth’s grit research; Amy Wrzesniewski’s research on job crafting; John Gottman’s research on long-term relationships.