A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
Winners are really just the best quitters. Seth Godin shows that winners quit fast, quit often, and quit without guilt—until they commit to beating the right Dip.
Every new project (or job, or hobby, or company) starts out fun…then gets really hard, and not much fun at all. You might be in a Dip—a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing. But maybe it’s really a Cul-de-Sac—a total dead end. What really sets superstars apart is the ability to tell the two apart.
Winners seek out the Dip. They realize that the bigger the barrier, the bigger the reward for getting past it.
If you can beat the Dip to be the best, you’ll earn profits, glory, and long-term security. This book will help you figure out if you’re in a Dip that’s worthy of your time, effort, and talents. The old saying is wrong—winners do quit, and quitters do win.
Know when to quit OR persevere: THE DIP Animated Summary
By: Productivity Game
Key Takeaways
Winners never quit is a spectacular bad piece of advice. Winners quit all the time. Winners know that they only have so much time, money and daily energy, so quitting is an essential strategy to take advantage of better opportunities. When it comes to your career or your business, the only opportunity worth investing in, is the opportunity to become number one.
“If you’re not going to get to number one, you might as well quit now.”
Dip a temporary setback that will get better if you keep pushing.
Dead end think cut-de-sac or endow the road.
To know if it’s a dip or a dead end, you need to know who are you influencing?
Who are you trying to influence, a market or an individual? If you’re influencing a market, you’re in a dip and it’s time to persist. To increase your odds persisting through a dip and not quitting, you need to decide when to quit before the dip starts.
If you are making a decision how you feel at a specific moment, you may make the wrong decision based on those feelings. To avoid making last decisions and throwing a way previous effort, you need to determine your limits before entering the dip.
- How much time are you willing to spend?
- How much money are you willing to lose?
- How much pain are you willing to go through before quitting?
With those limits in mind, you need to make a quitting contract with yourself. Vow to not quit unless you go beyond those limits or something fundamental changes. With a quitting contract in place, you can calmly face panic and setback by asking yourself, have my predefined quitting conditions been met? Has something fundamental changed?
In the end, if you can’t be the best, then its time to quit. Quitting will free up precious resources so you have the opportunity to invest in activities that will allow you to be the best, and the fastest way to become the best. The fastest way to become the best is to get through more dips.
