Winners Never Quit? Well, Yes, They Do | Hacker News Reader

Winners Never Quit? Well, Yes, They Do

nytimes.com

23 pointsbootload16 comments

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/the_dip/

I'm a believer in stubbornness and shelving projects. I never actually quit something; Nearing the point of burnout and/or boredom with a hobby or project, I just put it on the back burner and let it simmer and resume it later.

Why? That just seems like a way to accumulate baggage. It seems more efficient to admit failure and move on.

I think my definition of project varies from yours. For instance, battling my shyness and/or my tendency to be a wallflower are my life-long projects. Individual experiences are softened as failures, the more it occurs. And I'm the first to say, I avoid failure.

It's easy to feel like giving up after asking a really good dancer to Salsa dance and having a brain freeze and reverting to the basic step and/or seeing her give you a bored look while doing basic moves, but I really intend to become a really good dancer. It's easy to feel like turning down an invitation to go out after a long week (but accept all invitations) and its good to put yourself into uncomfortable social situations (sometimes).

"Success is the process of living your life working toward worthy goals. And here is the brain tweak: once you reach your goals, you are no longer a success! You must set new goals!"

Be it sports, education, startups, or life, the pattern is similar.

Move fast. Develop iteratively. Fail quickly. Learn. Rinse. Repeat. Over time you will improve and be able to remove the fail quickly step. Since knowing when to quit is hard, removing this step based on non-achievement of realistic and measurable goals/milestones seems to work for most cases.

It's frightening how bland this is. History is absolutely full of tales where heroes, having given up on one path through life, find themselves blazing another. Redemption is one of the greatest emotional force we have. I hoped for a lot out of this article, and all I find is... a correlation with C-reactive protein?!

Funny concept: frightening blandness. Trying to imagine something both frightening and bland the only thing that comes to mind is our current president.

Chili's (the restaurant chain) comes to mind.

Please, no politics. If I wanted to read a forum where every thread was used as an excuse for off-topic Bush-bashing I'd read.... well, pretty much any other forum in existence.

Those tales sound interesting. Can you give an or some examples please?

Malcom Gladwell's writing is chock full of them, but here's one that's cute: http://www.davidgalenson.com/malcolmgladwell-lecture.pdf

I was reminded of this quote:

"If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There's no use being a damn fool about it." --W.C. Fields

Nice article -- I think the first thing one would tend to apply it to in a startup context is a startup as a whole, but I believe in a successful startup quitting often, and at the right time is critically important. It seems foregone when going into something new that your assumptions will be wrong a lot of the time. Figuring out when to give up on some strategy, despite having invested time in it and go to try the ones that are working seems to be one of the rules of engagement.

Yeah, because Edison gave up after a couple hundred failures. That's why it's so dark in here.

Yeah, good point. What I guess this boils down to is, if quitting is the right decision, quit. If it's the wrong decision, don't quit. Don't rule it out, and in general, try to make the right decisions. Not super enligtening.

But he knew when to quit ideas that didn't have hope. It freed his time up enough to move onto other, more promising ideas.

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