Too Legit To Quit

Status Quo Bias And Why You Need A "Quit Coach"

“I hustle for my muscle and you look weak, son (Real weak)
Yeah, I'm goin' for all that I can get
Kickin' it at the top 'cause I'm too legit to quit…”

-M.C. Hammer, “Too Legit to Quit”

In my first week of rabbinical school, I took a class with Dr. Peter Pitzele, the creator of what is known as “Bibliodrama.”   Bibliodrama is a method of textual interpretation combining traditional commentaries, theater, and psychology to encourage individuals to put themselves into the mindset of biblical figures all of us know.

• What would we say if we were the first rock that Moses struck to bring water?   What would we say if we were the second?

• What was Vashti’s stream of consciousness when she said “no” to Ahasvereus in the Purim story?   

• And could we find empathy through the story of an ordinary Egyptian on the night of the tenth plague?

Dr. Pitzele’s workshop focused on Abraham's journey to Canaan through the prism of beginning rabbinical school.

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  At the end of the workshop, the students were asked to imagine that they were Abraham at the end of his life and what questions he might be asking himself.    I wanted to know this:

“What all of this really worth it?”

Abraham is told to leave everything that he knows so that he will one day become a “great nation.”  Yet at the end of Abraham’s life, he has one “Hebrew” son (Isaac), a son he was told to sacrifice.

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    In addition, Abraham sent away another son (Ishmael), pretended his wife was his sister, and prophesied the destruction of two cities, Sodom and Gomorrah.  Furthermore, the Torah specifies that Abraham takes another wife, Keturah, and has many children, none of whom are considered a part of God’s “great nation.”  As I put myself into Abraham’s shoes, I pointed out that it would be reasonable if Abraham ever wondered whether or not God fulfilled that promise.

Of course, Abraham has no way of knowing what will happen when he accepts God’s command.    And even if he did, once he made the decision to go, it would be difficult for even the wisest person to turn back.   

Even for Abraham, the status quo is a powerful force.

Status Quo Bias

Ok, so the idea that there is something called the “status quo bias” may first seem like the Captain Obvious version of heuristics.    Anyone who ever tried to get someone to overcome their resistance to change knows that.  The interesting question is how the status quo bias manipulates the conversation around change.   

The term “status quo bias” was coined by William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser in a 1988 paper in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty.

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  In this experiment, participants were given a set of choices presented through a “neutral framing,” where all options were presented without identifying any option as the current status quo, and through a “status quo framing,” where the status quo was presented in addition to alternatives.   The authors found that status quo framing had “predictable and significant effects” on decision-making, and the greater the options, the “the stronger was the relative bias for the status quo.”  In other words, people were more likely to select an option just by virtue of that option being labeled the status quo.

The implications of this research can be profound: Many leaders struggle with unwinding decisions that should have never been made, everything from hiring certain staff, launching initiatives, or starting a building campaign.    In many cases, even in face of negative signals, people will “create inferences suggesting that the original choice was appropriate” (40), seeking out information to justify the status quo even when evidence suggests otherwise (i.e. confirmation bias).   Other times, people will engage in an escalation of commitment, spending even more time and resources on a decision whose fate as a bad one might already have been sealed.

In this sense, Abraham experienced both sides of the status quo bias.    When God called Abraham (then Abram), Abraham was likely to choose to do nothing over going on a journey.   But once Abraham started, it was unlikely that he would stop even if he knew that it was the wrong decision.

It’s difficult to start, but often harder to quit.

Quit

Annie Duke is back!  

And not so that I can include another story about how bad I was at poker.   Duke gets the honor of being the first author to be featured twice in a newsletter by someone she’s never heard of (something I am sure that she will add to the top of her resume).   But I just finished Duke’s new book Quit- The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, and it’s fantastic.

According to Duke, “We tend to think only about one side of the human response to adversity: the ones who go for it,” the people who keep going when everyone tells them to quit (9).   We want to know about the person who published a bestseller after hundreds of publishers rejected their book or the person who overcame a terrible disease to run an ultra-marathon.   And while we live in a climate where “grit”

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is a value we want to teach to people of all ages, Duke argues that “grit and quit” are really two skills that must be cultivated together, because “Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest” (xix).

People do not quit for all kinds of reasons, many of them based on cognitive biases including the endowment effect, sunk cost fallacy, omission/commission bias, and the Ikea Effect (yes, there is such a term).  

Like her first book, Duke provides a variety of fantastic tools about how to know when we should quit, but my favorite technique is the idea that everyone should have a “quit coach,” someone who loves us and is fine telling us the unvarnished truth. Sharing the story of Rob Conway, a legendary angel investor in Silicon Valley, Duke describes how Conway goes about counseling founders he is funding that it is time to walk away from their startup.

Not surprisingly, the kind of person willing to create a startup is the same kind of person who is unlikely to quit. Nonetheless, when Conway first raises the idea of shutting down a startup, he does not respond by trying to convince the founder otherwise, but by asking the following question:

“Over the next few months, what specific, measurable outcomes could happen that will signal that the startup is on the right track?”

Duke calls this creating “kill criteria,” an agreement about the milestones that will answer the question of whether or not it’s time to quit. If those benchmarks are not met, Conway can sit down with the founder after this time period and point out that, by the founder’s own criteria, it’s time to stop.

The next time you are doubting whether or not it is time to quit a previous decision, try the exercise of creating your own kill criteria. You’ll be amazed at how it frames the conversation.

Weekly Links

1. We’re All Just Waiting To Get Fired: I will confess that I do not lose too much sleep about cancel culture; other things keep me up at night.  However, Sapir just published a powerful piece on cancel culture that challenged my thinking.    

2. How Many Jews Are Ready and Willing?: My friends who work in demography tell me that the Jewish community spends too much time and money worrying about counting the number of Jews, and not enough time on what to do with the Jews we already know exist.   Point taken. That said, estimating the population of American Jews is not straightforward.   Here is Sergio DellaPergola’s explanation about why.

3. Remedies For the Distracted Mind: If the world gives us new ways to be distracted every day, we need to spend every day finding tools to fight distractions.   Here’s a great introduction.

4. Choosing Your Next Book: Do my book recommendations intimidate you?   You’re welcome!   But if you are someone who has trouble deciding what to read, or have a bottomless “to read” pile, I loved this article from Farnam Street.

5. Sadder But Wiser?  Maybe Not: If you enjoyed the section on mental health in America that I shared last week, read this piece in The New York Times on the relationship between depression and wisdom.   The results will likely surprise you.

1. Foolishly, I did not realize that when I start linking issues to the Parashat HaShavua that by the time I publish this newsletter, the parasha I wrote about was actually the previous week’s parasha. As such, consider this week’s newsletter both a reference to Parashat Lekha Lekha and Parashat Vayera. I know you were worried…

2. Additionally, a close reading will reveal that following the Akedah (Binding of Isaac), there is no reference to Abraham speaking to Isaac or Sarah ever again. As my teacher Dr. Walter Herzberg taught me, sometimes silence is a powerful commentary.

3. William Samuelson and Richard Zeckhauser, “Status quo bias in decision making,” in Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Vol. 1, 7-59 (1988).

4. For the record: I LOVE grit.  I took Angela Duckworth’s test on grit and scored incredibly high.   However, a person who is high on the grit scale is also a person who may not know when to quit. Sometimes, the line between grit and stubborn is blurry.