We celebrate persistence relentlessly. Grit, resilience, not giving up: these are the virtues we teach children and repeat to each other, and they are real virtues. What we almost never teach is the other half, which is how to stop something that is not working. As a result most people are far better at continuing than at quitting, and a great deal of time gets spent finishing things that should have been abandoned.

The mechanism is the sunk cost fallacy, which everyone can define and almost nobody can escape. The money, effort and identity already invested make stopping feel like a repudiation of that investment, when in fact the investment is gone either way and the only live question is what to do with the time remaining. Worse, the longer something has run, the more publicly committed to it we have become, and so stopping starts to carry a social cost on top of the psychological one. Nobody wants to be the person who gave up on the thing they talked about for three years.

What has helped me is to decide the stopping conditions in advance, while I am still capable of thinking clearly about it. Before starting, write down what would have to be true in a year for this to be worth continuing, and then actually look at it in a year. And when the answer is no, treat the decision to stop as a success rather than a failure, because it is: you have just recovered the most valuable thing you own from something that was consuming it: time. Quitting well is a skill, and it deserves the same respect we give to persistence. So, as a reflection for today: what are you continuing mainly because you have already put so much into it?