An Expert Decision-Maker Explains How to Get Better at Quitting

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Speaker 1: This ad free podcast is part of your slate plus membership. But.

Speaker 2: What we lose sight of once we’ve started something is what we could be doing instead. And we’re so afraid of that moment from going from failing to having failed, that we will just keep going even when we shouldn’t.

Isaac Butler: Welcome back to Working. I’m your host, Isaac Butler.

Speaker 1: And I’m your other host, June Thomas.

Isaac Butler: June. You know, I was just thinking of you yesterday that you must be the one person in the UK who feels like may be okay about what’s going on because your book, Advance and Salary are paid in dollars hour. How are things going over there?

Speaker 1: Yes. At least one person texted me with that observation. On the day when the words pound plummets were all over the news.

Isaac Butler: That’s my drag name is.

Speaker 1: Unemployment is a good compliments.

Isaac Butler: Yeah.

Speaker 1: What goes up must come down. And I don’t want anyone thinking that I’m, like, doing all kinds of big deals to leverage this development. I’m just sort of watching the rate because Edinburgh as a big tourist center for some reason, lots of the stores on the main shopping street have the dollar pound exchange rate in shop windows, so I can see it all the time and I’m therefore experiencing tremendous guilt about being in a better situation than pretty much everybody else in this country.

Isaac Butler: I got it. I got it. So who did you talk to for this week’s episode?

Speaker 1: So this week I spoke with Annie Duke, who was once a professional poker player. And even though she hasn’t played professionally in more than a decade, I believe she’s still in the top five highest earning women professional poker players. And since she retired, she’s written several books, some of which are about poker, written for people who want to play better poker and some for general readers that leverage the lessons of poker, which boil down to it being the art of decision making based on probability. And it’s a very dull way of saying that. She writes really interesting books about helping you make better decisions. And she has a new book out on October 4th called Quit the Power of Knowing When to Walk Away. And she and I talked about the ideas in that book and how they might be applied to decisions about creative projects.

Isaac Butler: Oh, that sounds really fascinating. So what did you all talk about for Slate Plus this week?

Speaker 1: I asked her two questions why she thinks so few women are part of elite professional poker. And something that honestly, I’ve been wanting to ask every economist and social scientist and all those people who do studies about the optimal way of doing things, which was basically how can we factor in society’s needs when every single individual is optimizing for their own wealth and happiness?

Isaac Butler: Well, that sounds great. And if you are a Slate Plus subscriber, you’ll have that waiting for you at the end of this week’s episode. If you are not a sleepless subscriber yet, you can sign up today at Slate.com slash working Plus.

Isaac Butler: All right. Now, let’s listen in on June’s conversation with author and speaker Annie Duke.

Speaker 1: Annie Duke. Welcome to Working. Today we’re going to talk about some of the ideas in your new book, Quit the Power of Knowing When to Walk Away, especially around commitment to creative work, but also about how you went about the process of writing the book. To begin, though, I wonder how you describe your new book and how you came to write it.

Speaker 2: I describe my new book as a book that’s having a conversation with grit. So I think that we as humans think about grit and quit as opposing forces where grit is a virtue and quit as a vice. Weak willed, cowardly, assertive, I’m sure many bad words. I mean, June. If someone called you a quitter, they would be insulting you.

Speaker 1: Fighting words.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So I wanted to have a conversation with that concept around grit to point out that obviously it’s the context that matters. There are things that you should not be doing that are causing you to lose ground. And if you switch to something new, you’re better off. And that we needed to start to rehabilitate the word quit.

Speaker 1: Yeah. I have to say, your book reminded me in certain ways of Oliver Bergman’s book, 10,000 Weeks. He was a guest on working recently in the sense that it takes something that we know. We know that our lives are finite, and it just kind of makes you realize, therefore, you need to figure out what it is you want to do with your time. And in this case, it’s like every decision is stick or quit. And so you need to, you know, be more rational about it or at least understand that that is an option.

Speaker 1: So it was it was very powerful in that regard. You start the book with a really stark and concrete example of a time when sticking with something was clearly, in retrospect, a big mistake, and that’s with Muhammad Ali and how he continued boxing long after it was healthy. But damage to our health isn’t the only time when we should encourage people to decide to stop doing something right.

Speaker 2: Yeah. So what you’re referring to is so Muhammad Ali, you know, obviously Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston and won the heavyweight title. But then, you know, he became Muhammad Ali. He was a conscientious objector to the Vietnam War, refused to serve. And when he did that, he was stripped of all of his titles and he couldn’t get licensed to fight.

Speaker 2: So when that finally resolved and he started fighting again, it took him four years to get another title shot. And by this time he’s in his early thirties. And there’s a really good fighter out there named George Foreman who basically just knocks everybody out with one punch. And that’s the end of that’s the end of it. I mean, he was undefeated, you know. I mean, I think this is the interesting thing is that when you’re really gritty, sometimes you do see things that other people don’t see. And people did not see that that Muhammad Ali could possibly be foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle. But indeed, he did. And he did it actually by changing his strategy.

Speaker 2: Right. He used to be the one who would knock people out really fast. It was really hard to punch him because he was, you know, float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Right. Indeed. And in this particular case, he went into that fight and took a lot of punches. Okay. So he was sort of in just enduring these punches. It goes the distance and he ends up regaining the heavyweight title. So I think that’s a good example of like the power of grit is that it can get you to achieve your goals even when things seem impossible and other people are saying no and so and so forth.

Speaker 2: The problem was that he continued to fight after that, so he took a real beating from Foreman. And what happens pretty quickly after that is you start to see damage to his kidneys occurring. His fight doctor for Pacheco actually begged him to quit and walk away and he refused and kept going. I Madison Square Garden refused to hold his fights anymore. Eventually, he couldn’t even get licensed in the U.S. And despite all of that, he kept going and obviously ends up, you know, in the end with with Parkinson’s syndrome. So I think it’s such a great sort of opposition.

Speaker 2: Right. Is that the great thing about grit is it can get you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile. Sometimes the path we’re on is causing us to gain ground. And then usually in that case, it’s worthwhile to stick, even if it’s hard. But a lot of times the path that we’ve started upon, for whatever reason, either we misjudged it, we went to start on it, or in Muhammad Ali’s case, things have changed, right? He has changed. The fighters he’s fighting against have changed so on, so forth, that when that occurs, then it can be you’re no longer gaining either enough ground or maybe you’re losing ground in relation to your goals. And then you want to switch to something where you can actually get to where you want to go faster.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And one of the the things that become. It’s very clear in your book is that it’s much easier to stick with something. Yeah. And, you know, you go into that in some detail to help people understand it. So why why is it easier to stick? I mean, I get that inertia exists, but often we’re pretty unhappy with the situation that we’re sticking with.

Speaker 2: So I think that there’s two main reasons. The first, which is I would say a little bit more philosophical, is that we’re we’re kind of certainty seekers and we don’t like to live with what ifs. And so once we started something, think about it like the only way for us to find out how it turns out is if we stick to it and if we walk away from it, we’re kind of left with that. What if, like, what if I had just kept going? Maybe I could have turned it around. And so that siren song of certainty, I think, makes us keep going. But seven apart from that, it has to do with what you just said that like. But oftentimes the thing we’re sticking to, even if it’s more certain path we’re miserable at.

Speaker 2: Yeah, and I think a lot of that has to do with the way we think about the way we process losing from the thing we’re already doing versus the losses that we might incur from something new that we might do. So whenever we’re making a decision to do something, there’s something called loss aversion that comes into the equation. Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel laureate, identified this, that we don’t really like to start things that carry some chance of loss. So here’s the interesting thing when you’re already doing one thing. You’re just doing it when you switch. So that’s just the status quo. If you switch to something new now, that’s a start. And when we start things, loss aversion comes into play, and loss aversion stops us from starting things. So in this case, a new thing.

Speaker 2: So I think one of the I love this conversation that I had with this woman, Dr. Sarah Austin Martinez. She was an emergency room physician. She loved emergency medicine. She got promoted so that she started being a hospital administrator as well. In the meantime, she had two children. So this is like, you know, things change in your life. So the nature of her job changed. She was actually only doing about six shifts a month in the actual E.R.. Most of it was administrative work. And now she has small children and the administrative work is coming home with her and it’s interfering with her, her relationship with her kids. And she’s frankly, miserable. And she wanted to get my advice because she had another job in the offing that would have been evaluating cases for an insurance agency.

Speaker 2: So I said to her, okay, so. Why don’t you want to switch? And she said, Because what if I hate the new job? Okay, So that’s loss aversion, right? What if it doesn’t work out? Well, I’m very afraid of that. So I said to her, Okay. So the job you’re in, imagine it’s a year from now. What’s the probability you’re happy? And she said, 0%. I know enough about this job to know that I’m not going to be happy in a year. So, okay, what’s the probability a year from now if you take this new job that you’re happy? She said, Well, I don’t know. I haven’t been in the job before. I said, Well, take your best guess. She said, I don’t know, 5050. I said, Well, it’s a 50% chance of happiness greater than zero. And it was like immediately she saw what the error was that she was making. And she has now since left her job. And she’s taken the new one and she’s much happier.

Speaker 2: But I think that this is the problem, right. Is that that fear of a bad outcome from trying something new is so the way that we process that is asymmetric to having it not worked out from the thing we’re doing, so that when we combine these things together, I think that what happens is that by the time we get to a decision to quit, very often it’s not actually any longer a decision because like nobody will license us and we already have Parkinson’s and whatever, or the job is so horrible that we’re taking all of our sick days and we’re like curled up in bed. And it’s a completely unsustainable situation when clearly and we see this looking from the outside in at other people, you can see that someone should have quit earlier, but they don’t do it until they’re so sure that they have no other choice that it’s like they’re almost getting kicked out of that to go do something else. And then then we’re willing to do it. Because notice that in that case, there’s no more if.

Speaker 1: I think sometimes we just need it to seem really, really stark. And that’s that’s not logical. That’s not rational. But, you know, we are.

Speaker 2: And it’s no longer a decision then. Yeah, see, that’s the thing. It’s like we’re only willing to quit when it’s not a choice anymore. Yeah, because then we aren’t left with those. What is like, what if. If I kept going, maybe I would have turned it around. It’s like, No, you wouldn’t. You already fell into the crevasse.

Speaker 1: Right?

Speaker 1: So you, in the book, you have some really interesting concepts that I think listeners will find very useful when it comes to making decisions. And one that really stuck with me was the idea of kill criteria. So what’s that about?

Speaker 2: Okay, so I just mentioned that when we’re looking from the outside at other people, right, we can often see very clearly like, Hey, the thing you’re doing is working out. You might want to you should probably quit. But I think that what we can see, whether it’s Muhammad Ali or people climbing Everest or people sticking with businesses that are failing or whatever it is, that when we’re on the inside of it, that we can’t see that very well. So a lot of the strategies to getting better at quitting because quitting is a really important skill, right? Like if you’re doing something that isn’t worthwhile, that’s time and attention that you can’t spend on things that are worthwhile. So it’s a really important skill. We need to get good at it.

Speaker 2: One of the ways to do that is to say, Well, let me make some decisions about what would make me quit in advance when I’m not actually in the decision. So I’ll give you an example of kill criteria. So let’s say that you get a Ph.D. in the humanities. Mm hmm. And we know that tenure track positions in the humanities are very scarce.

Speaker 1: Mm hmm.

Speaker 2: And the number of them does not really change. If anything, it shrinks. But your dream, your life’s dream is to secure a tenure track position at a university or a college. Okay, so here’s the problem, is that there’s a whole bunch of things that can happen after you get your Ph.D. that can make you feel like you’re making progress toward the goal postdocs and adjunct positions. So you get the postdoc. You’re like, okay, I know this means I’m wanted. I’m good at what I do. That position’s right around the corner. Worse yet, you get an adjunct position and it’s okay. Now I have an in with the university.

Speaker 1: I can smell that new job. I can smell that tenure track position.

Speaker 2: As soon as a position opens, I’m in because I already have the adjunct position. And so clearly, I’m going to I’m going to win the job. And I’m sure that, you know, people that this has happened to, that’s this just kind of cycles and goes on and on. Yes, right. Because it feels like, you know, oh, I’m so close. I know I’m about to turn around on about to get this job. And then it’s 20 years later and they’ve been adjusting for 20 years. And what? And you’re just looking going, why aren’t you doing something else?

Speaker 2: Like, oh, my gosh, Well, kill criteria can help us do this, which is to say, look, just go do some research and say, you know, I’m sure you think you’re a top tier person, but maybe not just go look at what’s the average time from PhD to tenure track position in your field. Look at what that data is. Let’s say it’s four years. So four years from today, I’m going to circle a date on the calendar. And if I do not have a tenure track position by that point, I’m going to go do something else. I’m going to take my creative juices and I’m going to go apply them to some other field. So I’m not going to stick around in this academic thing because I can see the writing on the wall here because a rational version of me would understand that I don’t. My goal was not to be in an endless adjunct position for the next 20 years. That’s the situation that I’m going to get myself into. Right. So that’s like one good example of the criteria.

Speaker 2: Another one that I’ve done with sellers, which I love, is. So sellers are naturally great people. They won’t give up on any lead that ever comes their way.

Speaker 1: So sellers being like people in sales positions or in.

Speaker 2: Any kind of sales position, right? So if you’re selling software, you’re selling houses, you’re selling whatever, they will not give up by definition, right? They live to close the deal.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: So I, I did an exercise was with a sales force where I basically just sent out to them like, imagine that you generate a lead and it’s six months from now and you did not win it. These people sold software. Right. So it’s six months from now and you didn’t win the deal. Your competitor got it. Looking back, you realize there were early signals that things weren’t going to go well. What were they? And so they all generated they brainstormed and generated a list. And it was things like, here’s a simple example. In the first meeting that I had with the potential customer, all they asked me about was my pricing. So they didn’t ask for a demo of the software. They didn’t want to talk about what their own needs as an organization were. So they just wanted to know the price. Okay, Well, from the outside, we can see well, obviously they must be about to sign with someone else and they’re just trying to beat them down on price and figure out if you’re cheaper so that they can make a better contract with the other person.

Speaker 2: Right. Which they know in the abstract. But when they’re in it and they take that meeting and the person only talks about price, they’re like, I’m taking a second meeting because I still don’t know that I can win the deal, which is a waste of time. So now we generated a huge list of these types of signals, and then they committed that if they saw those signals, they were either going to not pursue the deal anymore or they were at minimum going to go find out, you know, more information, which in that case was, look, are you already really far down the road with the competitor? Because I don’t want to be a stalking horse here.

Speaker 1: Yeah, well, but, you know, so that all makes sense. It’s so clear when you put it like that. But as you say, when you’re in it and when you’ve already dedicated time, it’s just so hard to, you know, give up. So, you know, at working, we often ask our listeners to kind of share their creative challenges and we will try to help them.

Speaker 1: And one person wrote to us and ask for advice about when to quit a creative project. And, you know, to be honest, the fact that she asked probably was the indication that, you know, maybe the minute she started typing the email was the time. But, you know, she said her first novel was successful. She’d been working on her second novel for years. It just wasn’t coming together. And she wanted to know. When she should quit. Yeah, it sounds like you would say, Well, you already know. But also that when. So when are you saying that when you start to project, you should say, look, if this doesn’t work, these are the criteria I’m going to use to figure out if I keep going with it.

Speaker 2: Yes. So ideally you would do that, right? So ideally, you would say, I’m going to start this project. Let me just sort of say like, what’s the progress that I expect to see? Right. And then probably you should add a little bit to that because we generally tend to underestimate the time and.

Speaker 1: Attention.

Speaker 2: That something is going to take, but just sort of figure out, you know, and you can figure out kind of what’s the upper bound like, what’s the longest that I’m willing to tolerate having this many words on a page or thinking about how happy I am with the words that I have or whatever your criteria for fulfillment, right? You may be somebody who’s happy to work on a book for ten years and have nothing happen, but it doesn’t sound like this person is so ideal. You would do that when you start, but we don’t do that when we start. And even if we do do it when we when we start, you have some sort of short term goal for what you want to achieve to know that you should continue, but then you have to do it again.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay. So then you have to sit down and say, okay, I finished chapter one or I’ve done the outline, I have the plot worked out. What now is my deadline for the next thing you know, what’s going to tell me that I’m actually succeeding? And some of that may have to do with like, what’s the feedback, the quality, the feedback from my editor? Are they telling me in the nicest possible way, which I’ve had happen with books that I have started before that out to throw it out? So what we want to do is at any point, so she’s obviously very deep into it at that point that you think about quitting, it’s going to be very hard to do it at that moment if you haven’t already done this work in advance. But that’s okay because you’re going to believe that you can turn it around and that you’re not certain enough to walk away.

Speaker 2: But then that’s the moment that you should say, All right, this has been going on for a long time. I’m thinking about quitting. I need to see a certain amount of progress within some short period of time here. So in this case, maybe you would give yourself two months or something and then just set benchmarks. Right. These were be kill criteria. What is it that I expect to see for myself within the next two months? Write that stuff down. That can be things about just volume, your own judgment of quality, your editors judgment of quality, so on, so forth, and actually sit down and do that. And then the other thing I think that’s really important to say, let me imagine. That I quit today. What would I use the time for?

Speaker 1: Mm hmm.

Speaker 2: And I think this is also really important, because what we lose sight of once we’ve started something. Is what we could be doing instead. And there’s a huge cost to that because, for example, like if she’s been working on this book for three years, it may be that it’s just not the right book for her. And the fact that she started makes her not want to quit because that moment you quit is when you’ve failed.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Right. I mean, it’s not really. It’s just the way that we feel about it. And we’re so afraid of that moment from going from failing to having failed that we will just keep going even when we shouldn’t. But imagine, maybe if I stopped, could I write something else? Would that free me up to think about new ideas, something that might grab my attention more, make you know, fulfill me more, get me more excited? Where the words would just spill out onto the page. And what might that be? And or maybe I would quit and just use that time to explore and find something that got me excited. So you also want to think about, too. You want to think about that negative space. What is this preventing me from doing? And that should tell you something about the timeline within which you’re willing to tolerate it. And once you figure out that timeline, set the benchmarks for if I do not achieve these things, then I’m going to quit because that’s going to free me up to go do the other stuff.

Isaac Butler: We’ll be back with more from Jun’s conversation with Annie Duke after this.

Isaac Butler: Hey, listeners, Isaac Butler here. Just wanted to say two things real quick. The first is, if you’re enjoying this podcast and haven’t subscribed to it yet, make sure to subscribe to it wherever you get your podcasts. And if you’re already a subscriber and you like this podcast, you want to help us out. If you could leave us like a review or five stars or a thumbs up or a flip flop or whatever the podcast app of your choice asks you to do to register your love of a podcast, we’d really appreciate it because it will help us find more listeners.

Isaac Butler: The other thing I wanted to ask is that, hey, if you got something you want to tell us, you got a question you want to ask, you got a new kind of guest you want to hear from, you have advice, you need anything like that, please drop us a line at working at Slate.com or give us a call and leave us a voicemail at 304933. W. O. R k. Thanks again. And now back to June’s conversation with author and speaker Annie Duke.

Speaker 1: Another challenge that we often hear about is around prioritization. People really want to do something creative. You know, whether that’s right, short stories, whatever it is. But they’re busy. They’ve got kids. They’ve got jobs, They’ve got responsibilities, whatever it is, and it’s real. But the problem is that not being able to do that thing is really bugging them. It’s kind of it’s not ruining their lives, maybe, but it’s they can’t just cut off that desire. Does. Have any advice for people in that situation, You know, which is basically I’ve got ten things on my to do list, but I can only find time for seven. How do you decide which seven you can do? And still, you know, stop those little voices in the back of your head.

Speaker 2: The thing is, when you’re starting something or when you’re deciding whether to continue it or not, it’s really always a cost benefit analysis. Right. There are things that I’m willing to sacrifice in order to gain other things. And that’s going to have to do with your own values. What are the things that are important to you? So there are people who climb Mount Everest. That’s a lot of money and months and months of time away from your family and your friends and a lot of physical discomfort. In order to achieve this thing that’s itching at you.

Speaker 2: Right. Like I want to get to the top of the world. Right. Same thing. If you run a marathon, you’re trying to achieve something that very few people actually achieve. But there’s you know, you’re having to give up a lot of stuff for it. And that’s going to truth be true, whether it’s, you know, running a marathon or writing short stories. So you have to go through all of the things that are on your list and say, what am I willing to sacrifice in order to do this thing? And this is where this idea that grit is good and quit is bad becomes so absurd.

Speaker 2: Yeah, because you have to stop things in order to start other things. And you have to realize that there’s all sorts of reasons that you don’t want to stop things that have to do with like this fear of loss. What if I go to write a short story and it’s not very good and then I will have wasted my time doing it and I should have done the other thing. And and what if I finish short of my goal, right? I mean, this is something I think is so important. If you’re running a marathon and which is 26.2 miles and you stop after six miles, you failed. What? Why? Because you’re ten short miles short of the finish line. It seems to me you ran 16 miles. That’s a lot, right? But we don’t think about it that way. And so even though, you know, at mile 16, we figure out we shouldn’t be running this marathon anymore and we could use that time and attention, whatever, for other things, we still barrel toward the finish line. And that’s what happens with our to do list and the other things that we have on our plate.

Speaker 2: So you want to step out, particularly with someone to help you and say, this is something that I really value this creative process, even if it’s just writing short stories or poems or whatever it might be writing a little bit of music, anything. Yeah, And this is something that for me is really important. I have to look at what am I willing to stop in order to do it and not say, But if I stop those things, I’ll have failed.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 2: Because it’s not true. And the other thing that you need to remember is if you stop that thing and and you go to start the other thing and it turns out that you thought you had a niche for it, but you don’t really like it and you like the other thing you were doing before you even go back to it.

Speaker 1: Right.

Speaker 1: One thing I’m very curious about the writing of your book, so it’s a very well-constructed book. It’s a very compelling book. It’s a real page turner. And throughout it you illustrate concepts by sharing stories from life. Often they’re from the world of business or sports or even.

Speaker 2: Nate My own life.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your own life. Probably. Most compellingly, I imagine, for the bit, the stories from your own life. You found those, I think from introspection. But I’m curious kind of how you found the stories, which came first? The anecdotes or the concepts that they used to illustrate kind of, Did you have an idea of things that you wanted to illustrate and then you went out to look for stories, or did you find the stories first and then develop the concepts from there? And if I can just pile one more question onto this mega question, how did you kind of manage them as you were writing? Did you know did you have a a list of anecdotes, a list of illustrations? How did that writing project work?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so as how I came up with them, it was a combination. So in some cases I was trying to find a really compelling narrative that illustrated a particular point. So an example of that would be I really wanted to find something that illustrated the sunk cost effect, the some cost fallacy. We actually talked about it a little bit. It’s just that once we have time and effort or money into something, if we quit, where then we feel that we’ll have wasted that right? And so we’ll take into account that we already put something into it in the decision whether to continue.

Speaker 2: Okay, So a simple example of that would be like, this is the simplest example. I buy a stock at 50, it’s now trading at 42. I continue to hold it, which is the same as buying it. And you say, Well, I have to because otherwise I can’t get that $10 back. But that of course is silly because waste is a forward looking problem, not a backward looking one. Is it worth it for me to put the next dollar into it? And that’s true of the listener who wrote in. I’m sure that this is some of the feeling, right is I’ve put three years into this. If I abandon it, then I’ll have wasted those three years. But that’s not true that those three years are already spent. It’s should I the next minute, is it worthwhile for me to continue with this and that We need to start thinking forward. So I wanted something that really sort of illustrated that. And in my research I discovered something called the California Bullet Train, which is it’s a high speed rail that’s supposed to be connecting Silicon Valley and San Francisco to L.A. and San Diego to the. South and oh, it’s a disaster. So they epic.

Speaker 1: Proportions.

Speaker 2: Yes. They approved a bond in 2010 for $9 billion, which was supposed to start construction. That was 9 billion of 33 billion in projected costs. And that was back in 2010. And let’s just say today, no part of the line is operational. And the projected budget at the moment is $105 billion. You can read more about that in the book. But anyway, it was it was a really good example of sunk cost. And so in that case, I was actually looking for a story that illustrated the concept. But mostly what happened actually was that as I started doing research for the book, which involved, you know, I mean, I just like I think Daniel Kahneman and said, can you get on a zoom with me? I asked Richard Thaler to do the same. I talked to Phil Tetlock, a bunch of people who are researchers in the space. And, you know, as we were talking about the concepts, they would say, Oh, you know who you should talk to?

Speaker 1: Mm hmm.

Speaker 2: And then some of it was accidental. There’s an amazing researcher named Barry Starr who just really, really incredible has done amazing work in this sort of space of inability to quit. And when I was talking to him the first time, which was really in an academic sense, he sort of occasionally was mentioning his dad, Harold. And it sounded to me like I sort of got the feeling that his dad had started a business and then continued long beyond the point at which the business was profitable. And it was just like little hints here and there.

Speaker 2: So at some point when I was thinking, like, what do I really want to say in this book, I pinned him and I said, Hey, could we talk again? He goes, Well, you want to know more about my research? I said, No, I want to talk to you about your dad. And we had a two hour conversation where he was actually piecing it together because he hadn’t really thought about the full narrative arc of his dad and his dad. And, you know, Harold Starr ends up really illustrating a lot of these these issues of quitting. So that’s how I kind of sourced the narratives.

Speaker 2: But then, you know, and I think this goes back to quitting, right? Is I wrote a proposal. I wrote some of these narratives up so that they could see, you know, part of the quality of the writing that was going to be in that book. I set out what the chapters were going to be, you know, for the proposal for each chapter. I said what the narrative peg was going to be, the anchor was going to be for that chapter. And a bunch of those narratives never ended up appearing in the book. Not because actually I think they were quite good narratives, but because they didn’t quite they didn’t fit or I found another one that I thought was better. The order of the chapters that wasn’t my proposal is not the order that ended up appearing because I realized that the book was going to be better.

Speaker 2: You know, it’s always hard to figure out how you get into material, what the middle of it looks, how do you exit it. And there’s different ways to skin that cat. Mm hmm. And then the narratives actually moved around because the thing about a lot of these narratives is that you can pick different things out of them that would illustrate different concepts, but they all illustrate kind of all of the concepts. Right. And so it was, what am I going to highlight in this narrative and where do I feel like it should fit? And so that, you know, I would move them around and say, Do I think that this one is best for some cost, or do I think that this one is best for endowment or identity? But they all include all of them. So it was a lot of sort of mix and match.

Speaker 2: So, you know, I would say that when I wrote thinking about, you know, I remember sending the first chapter to my editor, Nikki, and she made a suggestion, This one, she didn’t say throw it out. She said, oh, you know, you have this narrative about Pete Carroll and the Seahawks at sitting in the middle of the book. I think you should put it to the front. And being a first time general audience author, I was like, Well, you can’t do that because I haven’t explained the concepts yet. Blah, blah, blah. Like I was whatever. And I said, okay, I’m going to think about it and I’m going to I’m going to write the rest of the book. But what I found was when I was writing the rest of the book, I had her feedback in mind and I was putting the narratives at the front. And then when I circled back to chapter one, I actually completely rearranged it and it was much better for it. And that’s a form of quitting.

Speaker 2: Yeah, with book two, she just told me to just literally throw the first two chapters out quitting. And what I realized by the time I got to this book is that great writing requires a tremendous amount of quitting. You have to quit words that you wrote, which is really, really hard to do because you love the words that you wrote and you put tons of effort into it and you constructed it that way for a reason and so on and so forth. But you have to get really brutal about it. And now with this book, by the time it gets to Nikki, she doesn’t have a whole lot to cut because I already cut it. I was like, I know I just wrote 4000 words, but it’s that and I just get rid of it.

Speaker 1: Annie Duke. I find your book totally fascinating. Really love talking with you today. Thank you so much for joining us. I’m working.

Speaker 2: Well. Thank you so much for letting me yak at you about my favorite topic for so long. I really appreciate it.

Isaac Butler: June. That was a fascinating conversation about one of my favorite topics how not to let most productivity advice ruin your life. As you mentioned, Annie is a former professional poker player. So I guess I have to ask. I’m a dad. Here comes the dad joke. Is she telling us you have to know when to hold them, know when to fold them, know when to walk away and know when to run.

Speaker 1: You know, Isaac, she is. And I just cannot express how many times I sang that song. Well, the chorus, at least when I was reading the book. I can also divulge that she does indeed quote that chorus in the book, but since she has a lot more restraint than I would be capable of, only once.

Isaac Butler: Write to me, it would be like each chapter heading would be a lyric from the song, right? Like chapter one, Know when to hold them, right? I loved her overarching point that most creativity and productivity advice is actually purely contextual. We say quitting is bad. It’s not always true. We say you need to stick with it no matter what and also not actually true. We need to rehabilitate some of the more unpopular concepts to have a more functional full life as people and as creative people. Are there other concepts out there that we need to rehabilitate the image of ones we think of as bad that that really have their uses? Or are there other household spiders of the productivity world that we need to rescue from their bad reputation?

Speaker 1: I don’t know that I have a concept to rehabilitate, but I have made a late life embrace of constantly questioning. Like, Do I still want this? Do I still enjoy this? Does this thing still motivate me? You know, as with so many things, this was occasioned by my recent move and seeing how much stuff we had and realizing how much of it really belonged to a different part of my life. And I actually wasn’t interested in quite a lot of that stuff anymore. Even though, yes, I had spent time and energy gathering it at some other point in my life.

Isaac Butler: Right. So we’re talking here specifically about your Ducktales commemorative figurine collection. Right?

Speaker 1: Don’t knock Ducktales. That’s all I’m saying. And I’m not going to pretend that I’ve no figured it all out because I spent way too much money sending a lot of that excess old stuff across the ocean. But I do think that the experience did serve as a really in-your-face reminder that humans and their interests change over time, and we should all be more open to letting go of stuff.

Speaker 1: What about you?

Isaac Butler: Yeah, I mean, I think my big one is the importance of the word no. You know, there’s a lot of like you got a yes. And how do you get to yes? What’s the. Yes, yes, this, yes, that, yes, this, yes, that. But actually, an enormous amount of the creative process, particularly creative collaboration, is figuring out what things you’re not going to do and what things aren’t. And you have to know what they aren’t in order to know what they are. And it actually learning how to say no. And I’m not talking about turning down work, although that’s a really difficult skill too. But learning within a process how to say there’s this exciting shiny thing here, but it’s not actually as relevant to this as I want it to be. And so I’m saying no to it or a collaborator. Mine has this idea and they’re very excited about the idea and they’ve worked really hard on the idea and it’s a good idea, just not for this project, so I have to say no to it. That’s a really hard skill to learn and I think one of the reasons why we focus so much on the Yes stuff is that it’s really uncomfortable to figure out how to tell people now.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I also think that’s something that is a sign of maturity and many times I’ve really thought, Oh my God, this young writer, for example, is really preternaturally talented because he or she said no to something like that wins my attention so much more than, Yeah, yeah, I can do that. Yeah. You know, it’s really, really hard. And but sometimes, maybe even often it’s definitely the right thing to do.

Isaac Butler: I mean, one example from my most recent book that I was, I thought where we figured out the right nos to get to a yes is the first like three pages. So sort of the first major gesture of the introduction of the book didn’t work when I turned to him and my editor was like, This is confusing. You know, I don’t understand this. Well, here’s my idea for how you could fix it. And it’s not that the idea was necessarily bad, like it would have made a compelling intro. It just wasn’t the right idea to start this book off with. It actually sort of positioned the book as being more about representational politics than it really was, you know, stuff like that.

Isaac Butler: So I wrote to him and I was like, Hey, I mean, I want to make my editor happy. I love my editor. We’re friends. He’s very perceptive. He’s a great reader. I wrote him back and I said, I agree with you that my opening gambit doesn’t work. I think this one also doesn’t work for the following reasons. Can we hop on the phone and, like, hash it out? And he was as soon as he read the reasons, he was like, Oh, yeah, no, you’re right. That that wouldn’t work for those reasons. Yeah. What about this? What about this? And that? That created a much more productive conversation that the existing intro to the book grew out of, you know, and so I know learn how to say no. Yes.

Isaac Butler: You know, Annie Duke lists a lot of great ways to tell if you’re in a situation where you should quit what you’re working on. One of them, though, is figure out those things before you even embark on it. She calls it kill criteria, which sounds like the, you know, latest military industrial complex thriller that will star Chris Pratt. You and I have talked before about how you need to figure out your own rubric of what success looks like before The thing you’ve made and spent years on is released into the world. She’s actually reversing that. She’s saying before you embark on it, you need to figure out your failure criteria. What did you think of that idea? Because I’ll admit, it made me really nervous.

Speaker 1: Oh, my God, Isaac, It is fully terrifying, right? Yeah, totally. It’s one of those concepts, too, where when someone explains it to me, I’m like, Yes, that makes all the sense in the world. I should do that. But I also know myself and I would do an amazing job. My, my kill criteria. They would be perfect, they would be nuanced, they would be insightful. They would be just so well calibrated. And then I would never, ever follow through. And that is why anyone more than $4 million in poker tournaments and I wouldn’t even play for pennies.

Isaac Butler: Right? Like, isn’t there a part of you that’s like, Well, if Apollo 11 had had kill criteria, would they have landed on the moon? You know, You know, it’s it’s a weird it’s a weird thing.

Speaker 1: I have to say, she does give some amazingly compelling examples in the book that she didn’t mention in the interview that, oh, sure, yeah. Kill criteria, like, yes, they’re amazing. But, you know, like most journalists are just about anyone who writes for a living. I am not a rational person because you know what? We could all earn much more doing something else. And of course, a smart set of kill criteria should reflect your values and priorities.

Speaker 1: You know, in the example that Annie gave of the newly minted Ph.D. who dreamed of getting a tenure track position, well, you know, maybe they wanted the academic life so much that they’d still rather work in an adjunct position than move to another field, you know, But people should do that intentionally rather than just drifting into it. And I think that commitment to checking in with yourself about whether you want to keep doing something or whether you want to quit is really useful and really important. I think it’s a fantastic idea to do. I’m going to say a quarterly review, even though I know a lot of people will be like, No, And I’m talking about the kind of process that a lot of people have to do once or twice a year in their job. But do it for yourself where you list everything that you’re doing in the various areas of your life and ask yourself, What should I start doing? What should I keep on doing and what should I quit?

Isaac Butler: That’s great advice that makes me terrified to think about implement. But as a former therapist of mine said this thing a lot that I found really helpful. The thing you’re afraid of has already happened all the time. She’d be talking to you about something and you’d say, Well, you know, I’m afraid about this, this and this. And she’s like, Yeah, that’s because it’s already happened. You’re actually reacting to the fact that it’s already happened. And that seems like actually a really key part of Annie Duke’s approach to quitting. Like, Oh, you might be miserable in your new job. Well, you’re afraid of that because you’re currently miserable in your current job. And you have to recognize that the source of the fear is that you’re actually already in the state. Yes. Not that you might end up in that state.

Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. It’s a really useful insight, I think. And it’s true. It’s really hard to evaluate how a new thing, let’s say a new job would make us feel. Would I find it challenging? Would it hold my interest? Would the commute make me miserable? It’s unknowable, but we can and should ask those questions of what we think the new thing would like, but also what we know. The thing that we’re currently doing is, you know, and then we have to be brutally honest with ourselves about that current situation when we weigh it against the likelihood of how the new thing would work out. It seems so basic, but I’m not sure I’ve ever done it for all the sense that it makes.

Isaac Butler: I mean, the sunk cost fallacy is a really real and powerful thing. That was one of my big takeaways from this interview is that, wow, the sunk cost fallacy, it’s like the gravity of a planet. It is so hard to escape that thing. Yeah, you know, there’s a quote in Macbeth where he says something like, You know, I’ve gone so far in blood that. Turning back would be as tedious as to go forward. It’s when he’s deciding to commit more murders, you know, and most of us aren’t murderers. And really, McBeth should have gotten some kill criteria about killing. But, you know, the sunk cost fallacy is a big thing.

Isaac Butler: Are there are times where you’ve quit bad situations of the kind that Annie is discussing? Here were times when you know, now that you’ve done this interview, now that you’ve read the book, you think, Oh, Ivy, well, you’re not Jewish, but maybe you’ll think, Oh, maybe I should have gotten out of that much earlier.

Speaker 1: This will sound super trivial, but I was thinking about it earlier this week and someone offered me an 8 a.m. appointment and I immediately said, Yeah, I can do that, knowing that indeed I could do that quite easily. And I realized that getting to an 8 a.m. appointment is just something that adults do. But for years, years, I was incapable of getting my ass out of bed before like 11. And when I look back on that, I wonder what, what, what, what was going on? Why? And of course, once I had to get a real job, Yes, yes, I could. But it was real. I swear. It was. It was overwhelming.

Speaker 1: And ultimately, of course, I realize now it was about acknowledging a problem, asking myself what was really going on. It was about acknowledging the need to make a change. But I have to tell you, it was miserable at the time. And yeah, staying in bed when everyone else was at work was not bringing me joy. So like it if maybe not quite that scenario, but it just feels the same. If like I could not change and I knew it was awful and it was just so hard. What about you? I hope yours is a bit more.

Isaac Butler: I mean, I. I can think of past romantic relationships that, you know, had, you know, sort of I think a lot of us don’t acknowledge they failed until they’ve they’ve really failed until it’s way past the failure point. Certainly there’s been jobs recently. I really overcommitted myself. And this was not I mean, most of this was actually postponing things instead of quitting them, but just realizing like, okay, my priorities right now are teaching the class. I’m teaching doing this podcast, proposing the next book and applying for a couple of grants, and I just have to move everything else off the table because all of that is already too much, you know? But I’m going to tell you a funny one.

Isaac Butler: All right. I got a funny one. All right. At least I think it’s funny. I have a lot of trouble admitting failure when I’m reading books. Oh, particularly great books. I have a lot of trouble just being like, you know what? I’ve given it the old college try. What? Maybe the book isn’t right for me. Maybe I’m at the wrong time of my life. And the most recent one for me was Brothers Karamazov, which I got two thirds of the way through. And then I was like, every sentence of reading this is bringing me agony and despair. I just like, I can’t do it anymore. There’s some interesting stuff here. I just can’t keep going. Even if Freud thought this was the greatest novel of all time or whatever, and everyone on my writer group chat was like, Just stop reading it. What’s the matter with you? Just stop reading it. You hate it. You complain about it every day, how much you hate it. And it took so long for me to just admit defeat and just be like, I’m not going to get all the way through The Brothers Karamazov. I might never get all the way through it. And that’s okay.

Isaac Butler: And I had to examine what are the hang ups that are making me go through it, you know, Is that because I was a drama major and I don’t want to appear uneducated? Is it, you know, what were the anxieties that were keeping me going through it? Because I do think, you know, to flip this back on itself again, sometimes we’re doing things that are hard and they’re just hard. They’re stretching you in new ways. And it is important not to quit just because something is hard. Often great things come out of that, but recognizing when you’ve just reached the point of no return and you know you’re reading one sentence a day and then falling asleep or whatever the equivalent is in your life, I think is is really important.

Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s okay. And not just okay, but it’s actually important, you know, where you have a choice between happiness and misery. Because we don’t always have choices. We don’t always get to pick what we can do. But when we can pick, we should pretty much always pick happiness over misery. I think.

Isaac Butler: I mean, life is hard enough.

Speaker 1: It’s.

Isaac Butler: Well, that’s all the time we have for this week, and we really hope you’ve enjoyed the show. If you have, please remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and that way you will never miss an episode. And if I could just put one last bug in your ear about joining Slate Plus, you’ll get ad free podcasts. Extra segments on shows like the Waves and Culture Gabfest and this one. You’ll never hit a paywall on the Slate site. It’s like a cornucopia of goodies. As June said, Choose happiness. Choose Slate Plus. To learn more, go to Slate.com slash working Plus.

Speaker 1: Thank you to our guests this week Annie Duke and to our producer Cameron Drews, who we pray nightly and twice during the day will never quitters. Tune in next week for current interview with artist Drusilla Adeline. Until then, get back to work. Hastily put members. Thank you so much for your support, which makes extra segments like this one possible.

Speaker 1: Okay, So before I ask this question, I have to admit that I’m using you as a proxy for all the economists and social scientists. Don’t do that. Yeah. Who do experiments to figure out the logical or rational path, And then they’re all shocked when people don’t do those things. Or perhaps to suggest other reasons that people might take a path other than the most rational.

Speaker 1: So at one point in the book, you mention a study involving taxi drivers. They’re able to work a maximum of 12 hours a day. And a study found that they weren’t always using those potential 12 hours optimally. Okay. So the reason I’m bringing this up is that sometimes there’s like a larger public good. So another similar profession that I’m familiar with is dentistry. Like taxi drivers, the vast majority of dentists are self-employed. They’re doing microsurgery with no room for errors. So they can’t do it, you know, for 1000000 hours. So the optimal thing to do with the time that they have is to, you know, earn the most money to work with the highest paying patients rather than people who are covered by Medicaid or CHIP, which pay less. But that means that we don’t have enough dentists caring for kids and adults who receive those benefits. And people also need taxis that suboptimal shift times.

Speaker 1: So really this big question is to say, how do you square the kind of decision optimisation techniques that your books lay out so well with kind of social needs? You know, these are all great things for like the individual to, to figure out what’s best for you, but kind of on a societal basis, like we don’t always want things to be optimal, right?

Speaker 2: Well, first of all, we have to understand that there are individual values and there are societal values, right? So like in the simpler sense, when humanoids were leaving Africa, one individual going on that track was probably losing to that decision, but humanity was winning to it. Okay, So I think that’s what you’re trying to get at, right? They were really likely to die, but like you send a thousand people to go and find new resources and we actually thrived because of it. But in the case of the taxi drivers actually serving the public good is also served by them serving themselves. So let me explain why.

Speaker 2: So first of all, let me tell people what the problem is. This is work done by Colin Camara. So this is before Uber, looking at trip sheets from the 1980s for cab drivers. And the way cab drivers work is most of them don’t own their own medallions. In other words, they don’t own the cab or the license for the cab. They rent it and they rent it for 12 hours. And so they just wanted to look and say like, well, when are they driving and when aren’t they?

Speaker 2: And what they found was that when they were earning a lot of money, they were quitting really fast. In other words, you’re not going to drive the whole 12 hours that you rent in the cab, but they would like start driving and then stop pretty quickly when there were lots and lots of fares around. And then when there were very few fares around, they just kept going. They didn’t get out of their cabs. Okay. So that’s clearly suboptimal, right? Like, you should drive when there’s lots of fares and not drive when there are very few fares. But they were not doing that. And the question is why? And the reason is that they were using a higher risk, which didn’t was irrational for them, but also irrational for the public.

Speaker 2: And I’ll explain that part in a second, which went like this. I would like to earn a certain amount a day. So they had a goal, a finish line, like 26.2 miles. That’s what I’d like to get to. So let’s say it was $500. So I want to earn $500. What you know, today and basically when they hit $500, they quit. And if they didn’t hit $500, they kept going. Now, when were they going to hit $500 really fast was well, that was when there were lots of fares around and people needed rides. But notice by doing this, cabs are coming off of the line, right? So if they were to quit when there weren’t a lot of fares, Right. That would mean that they wouldn’t hit the 500. So they’d keep driving forever. So.

Speaker 2: So how suboptimal was this? Well, if they had actually used the heuristic of going to drive when there’s lots of fares and I’m not going to drive when there’s very few, and they would have made 15% more money than they actually did using their I’m just going to hit the goal method. And if they were random, if they said, I’m just going to drive 6 hours a day or whatever, they would have made 8% more than they actually did. So we can see that this is very harmful to them.

Speaker 2: But it’s also if they were actually to be rational, it would be good for the public because it what it would mean is that there would be more cabs around when there were lots of people who needed to be picked up from a concert because they would continue to drive because there would be people to pick up. And when it was a slow day, there would still be cabs on the road because there would be fewer drivers that were each individually now able to make more money by staying on the road when they were few. Because basically what would happen is that people would start driving, they’d see there were no fares, they’d quit. But then the people who are left on the road would have enough fares to pick up and they would continue to go. So would all end up balancing out in the end and it would be good for the drivers and it would be good for the people looking for cabs. So, you know, if you wonder like it’s rush hour, why can’t I find a cab? It’s because everybody quit because they hit their earnings goal.

Speaker 1: Right.

Speaker 2: Right. And it would be better for them to stay on the road and it would be better for you as someone who wanted to be picked up to stay on the road as well. So I think one of the things that we need to understand is, is sort of twofold. Often times when an individual does act in their rational best interest, it’s better for society. It actually makes things chug along better. So that’s kind of piece number one.

Speaker 2: And piece number two is that your mileage may vary, right? So when we’re thinking about these quitting decisions, they’re going to have to do with what your values are. And there are some people who are going to prioritize their own personal sort of well-being over that of society. And there are other people and we know that there are these people who part of their values are I want to, you know, sort of the greater good, right? I want to help my tribe. I want things to be better for the people around me. And no economist would argue that they weren’t acting in their own self-interest because part of that cost benefit analysis is the greater good then for them. And they’re willing to sacrifice certain things like if I climb Everest, I’m willing to be uncomfortable. If I want to do something for other people, I may sacrifice wealth for myself, but that’s rational.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I have somehow not talked about you having been a hugely successful professional poker player.

Speaker 2: A long time ago.

Speaker 1: But yeah, well, yeah, but obviously that’s kind of one of the reasons that, you know, you have this great sense of, of making calls of, you know, on a on a rational basis. But I’m curious why there aren’t more women in professional poker. You know, I get that people need stakes and finances. But shouldn’t poker be an event where biology confers no benefits to any gender? So why is it still so male dominated?

Speaker 2: I think there’s a couple of reasons. You know, I think the first reason just has to do with STEM in general. Right. So if we can answer, why aren’t there more women in STEM? We can answer. Why aren’t there more women in poker? Because poker is a it’s, you know, the collision of math and game theory. Right. So, yeah. So, you know, I think that I think that we would have to answer that question. And I think people have been trying to answer that question for a long time. So you can, you know, other people, you know, go read what people say about that. But I think the other thing is that it’s a place where women really kind of select out. Also, it’s not pleasant. So when you are in a minority like you are in poker. So just so you know, like if you if you look at any given year and the World Series of Poker, only about 3 to 5% of 3 to 5, not 35, 3 to 5% of the entrance are women in in a space where there is no h.r. Department.

Speaker 2: And they do try to do some things to sort of make it more pleasant. But first of all, like, it’s just it’s just kind of not pleasant to be in those those situations and particularly when there isn’t anybody stopping you from being treated in a way that isn’t okay. So I think that a lot of women just sort of select out, you know, and when you look at some of the cultures back in the eighties on like trading floors and the way that women were treated there, yeah, I think there were a lot of women also selecting out of that type of job as well for very, very similar reasons.

Speaker 2: You know, and I’ve asked some people recently if it’s gotten better, and I think it’s gotten a little better than it was in the nineties, but I don’t know how much. And I think it’s just the nature of the environment. So I think it becomes self-sustaining. I think that because of the nature of the work and also that, you know, that sense of risk, right? Like, you know, in general, women are, you know, this is just population difference is not any given individual women. Women are less you know tolerate less risk than than men generally do, which is one of the reasons why in financial services it’s really good to have diversity because women do bring a different perspective that is actually creates a lot of success. Right? So like if you’re a good businessperson, you better get some women in the room. Right?

Speaker 2: But so I think that, you know, that idea of, you know, I’m going to go and I’m going to do this thing where I don’t necessarily know what my next paycheck is going to look like. You know, I think that’s a little bit harder. And also, if you look in the entrepreneurial world, it’s very similar. It’s very, very male dominated. And so I think there are some very deep things that make that happen, but then it becomes self-reinforcing. You know, if we think about, like bro culture, right, it’s like, well, it’s self-reinforcing. So women are less likely to go into that, but then they don’t stick around.

Speaker 1: Yeah, Yeah. And it’s kind of it’s a rational decision to quit almost.

Speaker 2: Of course, you know, I mean, I loved the game. I really did. But if you could have been a fly on the wall when I first started playing in Montana, listening to the things that were being said to me in the way that I was treated, you would not you wouldn’t have called me a failure for walking away from that. You would have said, Oh, that’s really smart for your mental health, lady.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: You know, and it was, you know, again, that cost benefit analysis that okay, I guess that that’s okay with me. I’m willing to take it because my love of the game is so great that I still feel that I’m benefiting from that. But I can tell you, you know, coming from the perspective of where I am now many decades later, you know, and I’ve been retired for ten years, but when I look at that person who was playing in the nineties, I want to scream at her, to walk away and to understand. And I wish I had had more mentorship that the things that I really loved at poker I could have been doing in better environments, right? I mean, I could have been a trader, for example, like I could have gone and been a stock trader and been doing the exact same thing. And would there still have been some of those attendant issues? Sure, But but to a much lesser degree. And so I could’ve been doing the same thing I loved with a little bit less heartache. Yeah, I wish I could go back and counsel that person, that there are other ways to do this thing that you love that would be in better environments, you know?

Speaker 1: Yeah. That’s it for this week. Thanks and will be in your earbuds again soon.

Speaker 1: So.