The world is stochastic

From Quit by Annie Duke

That’s why, if I had to skill somebody up to get them to be a better decision-maker, quitting is the primary skill I would choose, because the option to quit is what allows you to react to that changing landscape.

Any decision is, of course, made under some degree of uncertainty, stemming from two different sources, most of our decisions being subject to both.

First, the world is stochastic. That’s just a fancy way of saying that luck makes it difficult to predict exactly how things will turn out, at least not in the short run. We operate not with certainties but with probabilities, and we don’t have a crystal ball that tells us which among all the possible futures will be the one that actually occurs. Even if you know for sure that a choice will work out for you, say, 80% of the time, that means, by definition, that the world is going to hand you a bad outcome 20% of the time. The problem for us as decision-makers is that we don’t know when, in particular, we are going to experience the outcomes that make up that 20%.

Second, when we make most decisions, we don’t have all the facts. Because we’re not omniscient, we have to make decisions with only partial information, certainly far less than we’d need to have to make a perfect choice.

That being said, after you’ve set out on a particular course of action, new information will reveal itself to you. And that information is critical feedback.

Sometimes, that new information will be new facts. Sometimes, it might be different ways to think about or model a problem or a set of data or the facts you already have. Sometimes, it will be a discovery about your own preferences. And, of course, some of that new information will be about which future you happen to observe, a good one or a bad one.

When you take all these aspects of uncertainty together, it makes decision-making hard. The good news is that quitting helps make this easier.

Everyone has had the thought go through their head “If I had known then what I know now, I would have made a different choice.” Quitting is the tool that allows you to make that different decision when you learn that new information. It gives you the ability to react to the world has changed, your state of knowledge has changed, or how you have changed.

This is why it’s so important to skill up on quitting, because having the option to quit is what will keep you from being paralyzed by uncertainty or being stuck forever in every decision you make.