Something to readChanging jobs
Quit
A book on why we tend to quit too late, and how to decide when to walk away
Why it’s worth your time
Annie Duke's Quit argues the side the never-give-up advice leaves out: that we tend to stay in jobs, projects and plans long after the signs say stop. A former professional poker player with a background in cognitive science, she treats quitting as a decision you can get better at, with tools for making it before you're too invested to see clearly. For anyone half-sure about a job or a path, it offers a way to decide on purpose.
Deciding when to walk away
The book · About 7 hours of reading · Buy or borrow
How to get it
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- Read it with one decision in mind.
Pick one job, project or plan you're unsure about before you start. Watch for the parts on expected value, on why what you've already put in keeps pulling at you, and on the two strategies she draws from Barry Staw's research in her Art of Manliness interview: kill criteria and a quitting coach.
- Write a kill criterion: a state and a date.
For that one decision, write the condition that would tell you to stop and the date you'll check it, such as: if this project hasn't signed a pilot customer by March 31, I'll recommend we stop. Then name one person who will ask you about it on that date.
Good moments for this: when a project keeps slippinga year into a job that isn't workingbefore you commit to something big
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Duke's publisher sums up her paradox this way: stop at the right moment and it will probably feel premature. Expecting that feeling can keep it from talking you out of a sound call.
What might make this harder
Duke's tools are for deciding; acting can come later. Set the criterion now and use the time before the date to build your options, so that leaving is a real choice when it comes.
Questions people ask
What is Quit by Annie Duke about?
Annie Duke, a former professional poker player who writes about decision-making, argues that we tend to quit too late because of sunk costs, identity and other biases. The 2022 book offers tools for deciding when to walk away, including expected-value thinking, kill criteria and a quitting coach.
What are kill criteria?
Signals you decide on in advance that would tell you to stop, ideally a state and a date. One of Duke's favorite examples is the turnaround time on Everest: if climbers haven't reached the summit by a set hour, they turn back.
How do I know when it's time to quit my job?
Duke's approach is to ask whether staying is still the better bet going forward, setting aside what you've already put in, and to decide on a sign and a date in advance so you aren't choosing in the moment.
Is Quit the opposite of Grit?
Not quite. Duke has said she agrees with Angela Duckworth, and that the point is to stick with hard things that are worth it and quit the ones that aren't.
What it says, and how it holds up
Sticking and quitting are, in Duke's framing, the same decision seen from two sides, and only one of them gets praised. Introducing their Art of Manliness conversation, Brett McKay describes the book as an effort to rehabilitate quitting, and Duke points out how many euphemisms we use for it instead, such as pivoting or starting a new chapter. Her diagnosis is that the signals to stop arrive while we're too invested to read them. Sunk costs, the extra value we place on what we already own, and identity all push toward one more try, and she leans on Barry Staw's research on escalation of commitment to show that simply knowing about these biases doesn't do much.
So her tools work ahead of time. Kill criteria are the signs, set before you start, that would tell you to stop; a quitting coach is someone outside the decision who can say what you can't see. The book's stories run from Everest climbers to Stewart Butterfield, who shut down an online game and turned its internal chat tool into Slack, an example Tom Ehrenfeld highlights in his strategy+business review. For a taste first, that free interview covers kill criteria and the quitting coach in her own words.
Simon Howard, writing on his own blog, wasn't persuaded. He agreed with the central argument and valued the point about identity, but thought Duke pushes economic rationality too far, and called setting fixed criteria for things like a promotion or a relationship a bleak way to live. When the thing you're unsure about is something you're still learning from, or a goal that's changing as you grow, a fixed deadline may cut short the very growth you went in for, and a fresh look at what you want next may serve you better than a criterion.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.