When to Stick with Something — and When to Quit

October 23, 2018

Here is an excerpt from an article written by André Spicer for Harvard Business Review and the HBR Blog Network. To read the complete article, check out the wealth of free resources, obtain subscription information, and receive HBR email alerts, please click here.

Credit: INTI OCON/Getty Images

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When Vontae Davis walked off the field at halftime, the Buffalo Bills were down 28-6 to the Los Angeles Chargers. But instead of huddling with teammates, the Bills cornerback quit football entirely, right then and there. Later that evening, Davis announced his retirement on social media, saying “today on the field, reality hit me hard and fast: I shouldn’t be out there anymore.” Many were outraged, including Bills linebacker Lorzenzo Alexander: “It’s just completely disrespectful to his teammates.” But some disagreed, saying Davis was “a goddamn working class hero.”

While unorthodox, Davis’s abrupt mid-game retirement sparked strong emotions for a variety of reasons, including a question many of us ask: How long should I stick with something? Fortunately, we don’t have to rely on NFL commentators to find answers to this question.

Perseverance has received lots of support in recent years from a variety of schools of research. One is from psychologists studying grit. They have found the capacity to stick to a task — particular when faced with difficulties – is a crucial factor in explaining the success of everyone from kids in the national spelling bee to recruits at West Point to Ivy league undergraduates.

Then there’s the idea that persevering in the face of adversity can prompt learning and improvements of skills. Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindsets has found that those who treat challenges and limitations as an opportunity to develop and learn tend to perform better in the long term. They persist when they face challenges, and the reward is a deeper and wider skill set.

How Good Are You at Quitting?

For each question give yourself a score from 1 (almost never true) to 5 (almost always true).

If I had to stop pursuing an important goal in my life…

1. It’s easy for me to reduce my effort toward the goal.
2. I find it easy to stop trying to achieve the goal.
3. I am not committed to the goal for a long time; I can let it go.
4. It’s easy for me to stop thinking about the goal and let it go.
5. I think about other new goals to pursue.
6. I seek other meaningful goals.
7. I convince myself that I have other meaningful goals to pursue.
8. I tell myself that I have a number of other new goals to draw on.
9. I start working on other new goals.
10. I put effort toward other meaningful goals.

Once you’ve completed the test, add up your score of questions 1-4. This will give you a sense of how good you are at disengaging from an existing goal. The average score is about 10. If you scored 13 or more, then you are very good at disengaging from old goals. If you scored 7 or less, then you are very bad at disengaging from old goals.

Now add up your scores for questions 5-10. That will give you a sense of how good you are at setting new goals. The average is 21-22. If you scored 26 or more, the you are very good at setting new goals. If you scored 17 or less, then you are very bad at setting new goals.

Source: Carsten Worsch ET AL., 2013

A final benefit of perseverance is that we don’t know when our luck will turn. A recent study of the careers of nearly 29,000 artists, filmmakers, and scientists found that most of them had a hot streak in their career when their work received wide acclaim. These hot streaks happened at a random time in their career, however. They weren’t related to age, experience, or even being more productive. They just happened. This suggests that if you’re thinking about quitting, you should remember a hot streak could be just around the corner.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

 

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