The Dip by Seth Godin | Full Audiobook

Introduction

Hello and welcome to this audiobook. We will read the book “The Dip” by Seth Godin. If you’re enjoying our content, don’t forget to subscribe to our channel and give us a thumbs up. Without further ado, let’s get started.

Being the Best in the World Is Seriously Underrated

Being the best in the world is seriously underrated, I feel. Like giving up almost every day. In fact, not all day, of course, but there are moments. My bet is that you have those moments too if you’re the kind of high goal-oriented person who finds herself reading a book like this. You’re probably used to running into obstacles – professional obstacles, personal obstacles, even obstacles related to personal fitness or winning board games. Most of the time, we deal with the obstacles by persevering. Sometimes we get discouraged and turn to inspirational writing like stuff from Vince Lombardi. “Quitters never win, and winners never quit.” Bad advice. Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time. Most people quit; they just don’t quit successfully. In fact, many professions and many marketplaces profit from quitters. Society assumes you’re going to quit. In fact, businesses and organizations count on it. If you learn about the systems that have been put in place that encourage quitting, you’ll be more likely to beat them. And once you understand the common sinkhole that trips up so many people, I call it the dip, you’ll be one step closer to getting through it. Extraordinary benefits accrue to the tiny minority of people who are able to push just a tiny bit longer than most. Extraordinary benefits also accrue to the tiny majority with the guts to quit early and refocus their efforts on something new. In both cases, it’s about being the best in the world, about getting through the hard stuff and coming out on the other side. Quit the wrong stuff, stick with the right stuff, have the guts to do one or the other.

The Best in the World

Hannah Smith is a very lucky woman. She’s a law clerk at the Supreme Court. She’s the best in the world. Last year, more than 42,000 people graduated from law school in the United States, and 37 of them were awarded Supreme Court clerkships. Those 37 people are essentially guaranteed a job for life after they finish their year with the court. Top law firms routinely pay a signing bonus of $200,000 or more to any clerk they are able to hire. Clerks go on to become partners, judges, and senators. There are two things worth noting here. The first is that Hannah Smith isn’t lucky at all. She’s smart and focused and incredibly hardworking. And the second thing is that any one of the 42,000 people who graduated from law school last year could have had Hannah’s job except they didn’t. Not because they weren’t smart enough or because they came from the wrong family. No, the reason that most of them didn’t have a chance is that somewhere along the way, they quit. They didn’t quit high school or college or law school. Instead, they quit in their quests to be the best in the world because the costs just seemed too high.

The Value of Quitting

This is a very short book about a very important topic: quitting. Believe it or not, quitting is often a great strategy, a smart way to manage your life and your career. Sometimes, though, quitting is exactly the wrong thing to do. It turns out that there’s a pretty simple way to tell the difference. In addition to being smart and focused and incredibly hardworking, Hannah Smith is also a quitter. In order to get as far as she’s gotten, she’s quit countless other pursuits. You really can’t try to do everything, especially if you intend to be the best in the world. Before we start on the quitting, though, you probably need to be sold on why being the best in the world matters so much.

The Surprising Value of Being the Best in the World

Our culture celebrates superstars. We reward the product or the song or the organization or the employee that is number one. The rewards are heavily skewed. So much so that it’s typical for number one to get 10 times the benefit of number 10 and 100 times the benefit of number 100. According to the International Ice Cream Association, these are the top 10 flavors of ice cream: vanilla, chocolate, butter pecan, strawberry, neapolitan, chocolate chip, French vanilla, cookies and cream, fudge ripple, and praline. You’d be forgiven if you assumed, as you assume with most lists, that the top-ranked flavors did a little bit better than the others. But here is what the distribution really looked like. It’s always like this, almost always anyway. It’s called Zipf’s law, and it applies to resumes and college application rates and best-selling records and everything in between. Winners win big because the marketplace loves a winner. Here’s another example. These are box office rankings from a particularly bad week at the movies in August 2006: Invincible, Talladega Nights, The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Little Miss Sunshine, Beerfest, World Trade Center, Accepted, Snakes on a Plane, Step Up, and Barnyard. It’s hard to feel sorry for the horrible movie Beerfest after all; it came in fourth. But look at the chart of actual revenue. If you’ve read Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail,” this isn’t news to you, but I don’t care about the long tail right now. I want to show you the short head, the short, big, profitable head that’s the juicy share of the market that belongs to the people at the top of the list. The reason number one matters: people don’t have a lot of time and don’t want to take a lot of risks. If you’ve been diagnosed with cancer of the navel, you’re not going to mess around by going to a lot of doctors. You’re going to head straight for the top guy, the person who’s ranked the best in the world. Why screw around if you get only one chance? When you visit a new town, are you the sort of person who wants to visit a typical restaurant, or do you ask the concierge for the best place? When you’re hiring someone for your team, do you ask your admin to give you the average resume, or do you ask him to screen out all but the very best qualified people? With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top. You’re not the only.

The Value of Being Number One

Everyone looks for the best choice; everyone does. As a result, the rewards for being first are enormous. It’s not a linear scale; it’s not a matter of getting a little more after giving a little more. It’s a curve, and a steep one. The real reason number one matters, the second reason there are such tremendous benefits to being number one, is a little more subtle. Being at the top matters because there’s room at the top for only a few. Scarcity makes being at the top worth something. There are hundreds of brands of bottled water, and they’re all mostly the same, so we don’t shop around for bottled water. There is no top for bottled water. Champagne is a different story. Dom Perignon is at or near the top, so we pay extra for it. Where does the scarcity come from? It comes from the markets and our society set up. It comes from the fact that most competitors quit long before they’ve created something that makes it to the top. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. The system depends on it. The best in the world, anyone who is going to hire you, buy from you, recommend you, vote for you, or do what you want them to do, is going to wonder if you’re the best choice. Best as in best for them right now based on what they believe and what they know. And in the world, as in their world, the world they have access to. So if I’m looking for a freelance copy editor, I want the best copy editor in English who’s available, who can find a way to work with me at a price I can afford. That’s my best in the world. If I want a hernia doctor, I want the doctor who is best because she’s recommended by my friends or colleagues and because she fits my picture of what a great doctor is. That, and she has to be in my town and have a slot open. So “world” is a pretty flexible term. The mass market is dying; there is no longer one best song or one best kind of coffee. Now there are a million micromarkets, but each micromarket still has a best. If your micromarket is organic markets in Tulsa, then that’s your world, and being the best in that world is the place to be. Best is subjective; I, the consumer, get to decide, not you. World is selfish; it’s my definition, not yours. It’s the world I define based on my convenience or my preferences. Be the best in my world, and you have me at a premium. Right now, the world is getting larger because I can now look everywhere when I want to find something or someone. That means that the amount of variety is staggering, and it means I can define my world to be exactly what I have an interest in and find my preferences anywhere on the planet. At the same time, the world is getting smaller because the categories are getting more specialized. I can now find the best gluten-free bees available by overnight shipping. I can find the best risk management software for my industry right now online. I can find the best cloth and golf resort in North America with six clicks of a mouse. So while it’s more important than ever to be the best in the world, it’s also easier if you pick the right thing and do it all the way. More places to win, and the stakes are higher too. Andy Warhol was the best in the world. So is the Sri Fi Thai restaurant in Queens. So is my editor. So are you if you want to be. If you’re not sold on being the best in the world, you probably don’t need the rest of what I’m about to tell you. But if you’re sold on being the best but you’ve been frustrated in the route you’re taking to get there, then you need to start doing some quitting.

The Infinity Problem

The problem with infinity is that there’s too much of it. And in just about every market, the number of choices is approaching infinity. Faced with infinity, people panic. Sometimes they don’t buy anything. Sometimes they buy the cheapest one of whatever they’re shopping for. Faced with an infinite number of choices, many people pick the market leader. Bestselling books still outsell balance titles. Websites highlighted on dig still get 100 times as much traffic as ordinary sites. Big insurance companies get clients just because they’re big. The number of job seekers is approaching infinity. So is the number of professional services firms, lawyers, manicure shops, coffee bars, and brands of soap. Better to be the best. Is that the best you can do? Job applications in all capital letters, junk mail with a misspelled name, salespeople who are eager to open an account but never follow up, doctors that don’t bother to call to see if a new medication worked for a long-time patient. People settle. They settle for less than they are capable of. Organizations settle too, for good enough instead of best in the world. If you’re not going to put in the effort to be my best possible choice, why bother? Is “well, no one better showed up” a valid strategy for success? Are you hoping to become a success because you’re the only one being considered? The reason that big companies almost always fail when they try to enter new markets is their willingness to compromise. They figure that because they are big and powerful, they can settle, do less, stop improving something before it is truly remarkable. They compromise to avoid offending other divisions or to minimize their exposure. So they fail. They fail because they don’t know when to quit and when to refuse to settle. The biggest mistake they made in school: just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: being well-rounded is the secret to success. When you came home from school with two As, a B+, and 3 Bs, you were doing just fine. Imagine the poor kid who had an A+ and 4 Cs; boy, was he in trouble. Fast forward a few decades from those school days and think about the decisions you make today about which doctor to pick, which restaurant to visit, or which accountant to hire. How often do you look for someone who is actually quite good at the things you don’t need her to do? How often do you hope that your accountant is a safe driver and a decent golfer? In a free market, we reward the exceptional. In school, we tell kids that once something gets too hard, move on and focus on the next thing. The low-hanging fruit is there to be taken. No sense wasting time climbing the tree. From a test-taking book, skim through the questions and answer the easiest ones.

Superstars Can’t Skip the Hard Questions

First, skipping ones you don’t know immediately is bad advice. Superstars can’t skip the ones they don’t know. In fact, the people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don’t know. The people who skip the hard questions are in the majority, but they are not in demand. Many organizations make sure they’ve dotted all their i’s. They have customer service, a receptionist, a convenient location, a brochure, and on and on, and all of it is mediocre. More often than not, prospects choose someone else, their competition. Those competitors can’t perform in some areas, but they’re exceptional in the ones that matter.

The Magic of Thinking

Twenty years ago, I read a book that changed my life. It was called “The Magic of Thinking Big.” I actually don’t remember anything about the book at all. What I do remember is that in one quick moment, it changed the way I thought about success. My hope is that the next page or two might do the same for you. I want to change the way you think about success and quitting. Most people will tell you that you need to persevere, to try harder, put in more hours, get more training, and work hard. “Don’t quit,” they implore. But if all you need to do to succeed is not quit, then why do organizations less motivated than yours succeed? Why do individuals less talented than you win? It involves understanding the architecture of quitting, and believe it or not, it means quitting a lot more than you do now. Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations. Reactive quitting and serial quitting are the bane of those that strive and fail to get what they want. And most people do just that; they quit when it’s painful and stick when they can’t be bothered to quit.

Understanding Quitting

There are two curves that define almost any type of situation facing you as you try to accomplish something. A couple of minor curves cover the rest. Understanding the different types of situations that lead you to quit or that should cause you to quit is the first step toward getting what you want.

Curve One: The Dip

Almost everything in life worth doing is controlled by the dip. At the beginning, when you first start something, it’s fun. You could be taking up golf or acupuncture or piloting a plane or doing chemistry; it doesn’t matter. It’s interesting, and you get plenty of good feedback from the people around you. Over the next few days and weeks, the rapid learning you experience keeps you going. Whatever your new thing is, it’s easy to stay engaged in it. And then the dip happens. The dip is the long slog between starting and mastery, a long slog that’s actually a shortcut because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path. The dip is the combination of bureaucracy and busy work you must deal with in order to get certified in scuba diving. The dip is the difference between the easy beginner technique and the more useful expert approach in skiing or fashion design. The dip is the long stretch between beginner’s luck and real accomplishment. The dip is the set of artificial screens set up to keep people like you out. If you took organic chemistry in college, you’ve experienced the dip. Academia doesn’t want too many unmotivated people to attempt medical school, so they set up a screen: organic chemistry. It’s the killer class, the screen that separates the doctors from the psychologists. If you can’t handle organic chemistry well, then you can’t go to med school. At the beginning, when you announce that you’re pre-med, you get all sorts of positive feedback and support; your grandmother can’t believe her good fortune. But soon, the incredible grind of organic chemistry kicks in, and you realize you’re doomed. At trade shows, you see dozens of companies trying to break into an industry. They’ve invested time and money to build a product, to create a marketing organization, and rent booth space, all in an attempt to break into a lucrative market. A year later, most of them don’t return; they’re gone, unable to get through the dip. The same thing happens to people who dream of the untold riches and power that accrue to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Private jets, fancy country clubs, unchecked decision-making power; who wouldn’t want to live like modern-day royalty? Of course, if you look at the resume of a typical CEO, you’ll see that he endured a 25-year dip before landing the job. For a quarter of a century, he needed to suck it up, keep his head down, and do what he was told. He needed to hit his numbers, work longer hours than everyone else, and kiss up to his boss of the moment, day in and day out, year after year. It’s easy to be a CEO; what’s hard is getting there. There’s a huge dip along the way. If it was

Curve Three: The Cliff

Rare but scary, cigarettes, it turns out, were redesigned by scientists to be particularly addictive. If you were going to draw a chart of the pleasure of smoking over time, it would look like this, except for that nasty drop-off at the end, otherwise known as emphysema. Smoking is a marketer’s dream come true because smoking is designed to be almost impossible to quit. The longer you do it, the better it feels to continue smoking; the pain of quitting just gets bigger and bigger over time. I call this curve a cliff. It’s a situation where you can’t quit until you fall off and the whole thing falls apart. It’s no wonder that people have trouble stopping; the thing is a profession in selling isn’t like smoking cigarettes, neither is making it as a singer or building a long-term relationship with someone you care about. Most of the time, the other two curves are in force. The dip and the Cisac aren’t linear; they don’t spoon-feed you with little bits of improvement every day, and they’re just waiting to trip you up. If it is worth doing, there’s probably a dip. Tennis has a dip; the difference between a mediocre club player and a regional champion isn’t innate talent, it’s the ability to push through the moments where it’s just easier to quit. Politics has a dip as well; it’s way more fun to win an election than to lose one, and the entire process is built around many people starting while most people quit. The dip creates scarcity. Scarcity creates value. The Cisac and the cliff are the curves that lead to failure. If you find yourself facing either of these two curves, you need to quit, not soon, but right now. The biggest obstacle to success in life, as far as I can tell, is our inability to quit these curves soon enough. It’s easy to complain that the advice in this little book is brain-dead obvious. I mean, who doesn’t already know that the secret to success is to be successful, that providing a great product or service is the right thing to do, and that you shouldn’t quit in the face of adversity? You don’t, that’s the bad news. The good news is that your boss and your competitors don’t know either. I mean, you know it, but my guess is that you’re not doing anything about it. When it comes right down to it, WR down to the hard decisions: are you quitting any project that isn’t a dip, or is it just easier not to rock the boat, to hang in there, to avoid the short-term hassle of changing paths? What’s the point of sticking it out if you’re not going to get the benefits of being the best in the world? Are you overinvesting in sunk costs? Set out to make it through the dip. The people who invest the time and the energy and the effort to power through the dip, those are the ones who become the best in the world. They are breaking the system because instead of moving on to the next thing, instead of doing slightly above average and settling for what they’ve got, they embrace the challenge. For whatever reason, they refuse to abandon the quest, and they push through the dip all the way to the next level. Snowboarding is a hip sport; it’s fast, exciting, and reasonably priced, and it makes you look very cool. So why are there so few snowboarders? Because learning the basic skills constitutes a painful dip. It takes a few days to get the hang of it, and during those few days, you’ll get pretty banged up. It’s easier to quit than it is to keep going. The brave thing to do is to tough it out and end up on the other side, getting all the benefits that come from scarcity. The mature thing is not even to bother starting to snowboard because you’re probably not going to make it through the dip, and the stupid thing to do is to start, give it your best shot, waste a lot of time and money, and quit right in the middle of the dip. A few people will choose to do the brave thing and end up the best in the world. Informed people will probably choose to do the mature thing and save their resources for a project they’re truly passionate about. Both are fine choices. It’s the last choice, the common choice, the choice to give it a shot and then quit, that you must avoid if you want to succeed.

Chased by Charlie Singo and Pinkerton Agents

They were being chased across the Badlands by Charlie Singo and Agents from Pinkerton but kept heading for the hills, for tougher and tougher terrain. Why? Because he knew that in Open Country, he and Sundance would never have a shot at escape. Only if they got through the impassible Hills ahead would there be a chance that the Pinkerton’s guys would quit. The harder it got, the better it was for Butch, but the Pinkerton posse persisted. It wasn’t until Butch and Sundance faced certain death that they escaped. Hey, it worked in the movie!

Marketplace Competition and Adversity

Your Marketplace is competitive, filled with people overcoming challenges every day. It’s the incredibly difficult challenges, the dips, that give you the opportunity to pull ahead in a competitive world. Adversity is your ally; the harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition. If that adversity also causes you to quit, though, it’s all for nothing.

Jack Welch’s Strategy and The Dip

What Jack knew when Jack Welch remade GE, the most fabled decision he made was this: if we can’t be number one or number two in an industry, we must get out. Why sell a billion-dollar division that’s making a profit quite happily while ranking number four in market share? Easy, because it distracts management attention, sucks resources and capital, and focus and energy, and most of all, it teaches people in the organization that it’s okay not to be the best in the world. Jack quit the dead ends. By doing so, he freed resources to get his other businesses through the dip.

Challenges in Wind Surfing and Customer Service

The thing about the wind, I can tell you that wind surfing is very easy except for the wind. The wind makes it tricky. Of course, it’s not particularly difficult to find and rent great equipment, and the techniques are fairly straightforward. What messes the whole plan up is the fact that the wind is unpredictable. It’ll change exactly when you don’t want it to. The same thing is true about customer service.

Embracing Difficulties in Various Functions

Every single function of an organization has a win problem. Accounting would be easy if every incoming report were accurate and on time. Sales would be easy if it weren’t for the prospects not buying from you all the time. Marketing would be easy if every prospect and customer thought the way you do.

Embracing Challenges and The Dip

Here’s the good news: the fact that it’s difficult and unpredictable works to your advantage. Because if it were any other way, there would be no profit in it. The reason people bother to go wind surfing is that the challenge makes it interesting. The driving force that gets people to pay a specialist is that their disease is unpredictable or hard to diagnose. The reason we’re here is to solve the hard problems.

The Dip as Your Best Friend

The next time you’re tempted to vilify a particularly obnoxious customer or agency or search engine, realize that this failed interaction is the best thing that’s happened to you all day long. Without it, you’d be easily replaceable. The dip is your very best friend. The reason we’re here if I could offer just one piece of inspiration, it’s this: the dip is the reason you’re here.

Diversification and Focus

The LIE of diversification. When faced with the dip, many individuals and organizations diversify. If you can’t get to the next level, the thinking goes, invest your energy in learning to do something else. This leads to record labels with thousands of artists instead of focused promotion for just a few. It leads to job seekers who can demonstrate competency at a dozen tasks instead of mastery of just one. Hardworking, motivated people find diversification a natural outlet for their energy and drive. Diversification feels like the right thing to do: enter a new market, apply for a job in a new area, start a new sport. Who knows? This might just be the one. And yet, the real success goes to those who obsess, the focus that leads you through the dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world.

The Woodpecker Analogy

A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy, or he can tap twenty thousand times on one tree and get dinner. Before you enter a new market, consider what would happen if you managed to get through the dip and win in the market you’re already in.

Confronting Reality and Embracing The Dip

Most people are afraid to quit. It’s easier to be mediocre than it is to confront reality and quit. Quitting is difficult; quitting requires you to acknowledge that you’re never going to be number one in the world, at least not at this. So, it’s easier just to put it off, not admit it, settle for mediocre. What a waste. You should be angry. Now I know that I am. I’m angry at all the worthwhile organizations that stick with a cisac instead of leaving it and investing their resources where they belong. I’m angry at all the people who have wasted time and money trying to get through a dip that they should have realized was too big and too deep to get through with the resources they had available. Mostly, I’m angry that it took me this long to be able to describe how simple the solution is, how Arnold beat the dip.

Understanding the Dip

The essential thing to know about the dip is that there. Knowing that you’re facing a dip is the first step in getting through it. Every time Men’s Health puts a picture of a guy with washboard abs on their cover, newsstand sales go up. Why? Well, if everyone had washboard abs, it’s unlikely that men would buy a magazine that teaches them how to get that physique. The very scarcity of this attribute makes it attractive. Weight training is a fascinating science. Basically, you do a minute or two of work for no reason other than to tire out your muscle so that the last few seconds of work will cause that muscle to grow. Like most people, all day long, every day, you use your muscles, but they don’t grow. You don’t look like Mr. Universe because you quit using your muscles before you reach the moment where the stress causes them to start growing. It’s the natural thing to do because an exhausted muscle.

Quitting and Overcoming Challenges

Feels unsafe and it hurts. People who train successfully pay their dues for the first minute or two and then get all the benefits at the very end. Unsuccessful trainers pay exactly the same dues but stop a few seconds too early. It’s human nature to quit when it hurts, but it’s that reflex that creates scarcity. The challenge is simple: quitting when you hit the dip is a bad idea. If the journey you started was worth doing, then quitting when you hit the dip just wastes the time you’ve already invested. Quitting the dip often enough, and you’ll find yourself becoming a serial quitter, starting many things but accomplishing little. Simple: if you can’t make it through the dip, don’t start. If you can embrace that simple rule, you’ll be a lot choosier about which journeys you start.

Superstar Thinking

Superstars get what they want because they have unique skills. Superstars command far more than their fair share of income, respect, and opportunity because there are very few other choices for a customer or an employer seeking the extraordinary. If you want to be a superstar, then you need to find a field with a steep dip, a barrier between those who try and those who succeed, and you’ve got to get through that dip to the other side. This isn’t for everyone. If it were, there would be no superstars. If you choose this path, it’s because you realize that there’s a dip and you believe you can get through it. The dip is actually your greatest ally because it makes the project worthwhile and keeps others from competing with you.

Embracing The Dip and Quitting the C-Sacks

But wait, that’s not enough. Not only do you need to find a dip that you can conquer, but you also need to quit all the c-sacks that you’re currently idling your way through. You must quit the projects and investments and endeavors that don’t offer you the same opportunity. It’s difficult, but it’s vitally important. Being better than 98% of the competition used to be fine in the world of Google, though it’s useless. It’s useless because all of your competition is just a click away. Whatever it is you do, the only position you can count on now is best in the world.

Reasons for Failure and Planning for Success

Seven reasons you might fail to become the best in the world:

1. You run out of time and quit.
2. You run out of money and quit.
3. You get scared and quit.
4. You’re not serious about it and quit.
5. You lose interest or enthusiasm or settle for being mediocre and quit.
6. You focus on the short term instead of the long and quit when the short term gets too hard.
7. You pick the wrong thing at which to be the best in the world because you don’t have the talent. By you, I mean your team, your company, or just plain you – the job seeker, the employee, or the entrepreneur. The important thing to remember about these seven things is that you can plan for them. You can know before you start whether or not you have the resources and the will to get to the end. Most of the time, if you fail to become the best in the world, it’s either because you planned wrong or because you gave up before you reached your goal. Is it possible that you’re just not good enough, that you or your team just don’t have enough talent to be the best in the world? Sure, it’s possible. In fact, if your chosen area is the ch or speed skating, then I might even say it’s probable. But in just about every relevant area I can think of, no, it’s not likely you are good enough. The question is, will you take the shortcut? You need to get really good at this.

The Dip in Various Systems

Why is the curve with a dip so prevalent? One of the underpinnings of the dip is the pyramid. A pyramid scheme is a scam in which the people at the bottom support the guy at the top, but it’s not always a scam. In fact, it happens a lot more than you realize. For example, lots of people will sign up for a health club membership. Having a lot of members lets the club keep rates reasonable, but the club itself is small because very few people actually come frequently after they join. That’s built into the system. If everyone who joined came, you’d never be able to find an empty bike or to afford a membership. Netflix gives you an unlimited number of DVD rentals a month, postage paid, for $10. How can this be? If you watched a movie the day it came in and sent it right back, you’d get to see at least six movies for $10. Of course, the key is that for every person who sees six, there are plenty of people who lose interest and see one movie or even no movies a month. These people subsidize the committed members. Sure, Netflix wants you to see a lot of movies. That makes you a loyal customer. But the economics of the entire business would fall apart if it weren’t for the uncommitted users who just dabble. For a long time, airlines oversold their flights because they knew they would profit from the no-shows. Politicians fully expect that the lazy and ill-informed won’t bother to vote. These citizens pay taxes which support the political life of the few who don’t quit the system. And of course, the entire college football money machine is based on a pyramid scheme of players who aspire to the NFL but will never make it. Whatever you do for a living or for fun, it’s probably somehow based on a system that’s based on quitting. Quitting creates scarcity. Scarcity creates value.

The Wizard of Oz Analogy

In The Wizard of Oz, there is an indelible image of the man behind the curtain laughing at Dorothy and her friends as he gives them incredibly difficult, almost impossible tasks to accomplish while he lives the easy life in AZ. He supports himself by sending his acolytes off on impossible missions. It’s no wonder we quit; the system wants us too.

Conclusion: Quitting in the Dip

If you see these dips coming, you’re more likely to make a choice. You can choose in advance to do whatever you need to do in order to get through the dip, knowing it’s going to be difficult, or you can give up before you get there. Quitting in the dip though isn’t worth the journey. Manufacturing dip, it’s easy and fun to start building.

Various Dips in Different Fields

Something in your garage: it’s difficult and expensive to buy an injection mold design, an integrated circuit, or ramp up for large-scale production. The time and effort and cost of ramping up your operation create the dip. The dip keeps the supply of stuff down and insulates those brave enough to invest in scaling up their production.

Those struggling artists at the local craft fair are struggling because they don’t have the guts or the wherewithal to take their work to the next level. Sales dip. Most ideas get their start when one person starts selling it – selling the idea to stores or to businesses or to consumers or even to voters. But the dip hits when you need to upgrade to a professional salesforce and scale it up. In almost every field, the competitor that’s first with a big aggressive salesforce has a huge advantage.

Education dip: a career gets started as soon as you leave school, but the dip often hits when it’s time to go learn something new, to reinvent or rebuild your skills. A doctor who sacrifices a year of her life for a specialty reaps the rewards for decades afterward.

Risk dip: bootstrappers learn the hard way that at some point, they can’t pay for it all themselves, especially out of current income. It takes a risk to rent a bigger space or invest in new techniques. Successful entrepreneurs understand the difference between investing to get through the dip (smart move) or investing in something that’s actually a risky crapshoot.

Relationship dip: there are people and organizations that can help you later, but only if you invest the time and effort to work with them now, even though now is not necessarily the easy time for you to do it. That kid who started in the mail room, who was always eager to do an errand for you or stay late to help out – she’s now the CEO. The relationships she built when it was difficult to do so paid off later. Those shortsighted people who are always eager for a favor or a break never managed to get through the relationship dip because they didn’t invest in relationships back when it was difficult but not urgent.

Conceptual dip: you got this far operating under one set of assumptions. Abandoning those assumptions and embracing a new, bigger set may be exactly what you need to do to get to the next level. The heroes who have reinvented institutions and industries – everyone from Martin Luther King Jr to Richard Branson, from Zelma Watson George to Jacqueline Novag Gritz – all did it in exactly the same way, by working through a conceptual dip all the way to the other side.

Ego dip: when it’s all about you, it’s easier. Giving up control and leaning into the organization gives you leverage. Most people can’t do this; they can’t give up control or the spotlight. They get stuck in that dip.

Distribution dips: some retailers, local strip malls, the web, make it easy for your product to get distribution, while others target require an investment from your organization that may just pay off. Getting your product into Walmart is far more likely to lead to huge sales than is putting it on the web. Why? Scarcity. Everyone is on the web, but getting into Walmart is hard.

Seeing the curve in advance, as you’ll see in the space shuttle analysis that follows, it’s pretty easy to determine whether something is a c-sack or a dip. The hard part is finding the guts to do something about it.

Optimistic entrepreneurs and employees who blithely wander into a serious business, totally outgunned and unprepared to work their way through the dip ahead, are in danger of building a space shuttle. There’s nothing wrong with optimism. The pain and the waste come when the optimists have to make hard choices when they get stuck in the dip. Time to cancel the space shuttle.

The space shuttle is a c-sack, not a dip. When pundits argue in favor of the shuttle, they don’t say we should keep doing this because it’s going to get safer, cheaper, more productive over time. The only reason the shuttle still exists is that no one has the guts to cancel it. There’s no reason to keep investing in something that is not going to get better. In fact, if we canceled the shuttle, we’d create an urgent need for a replacement. The lack of a way to get to space would force us to invent a new, better, cheaper alternative. So why don’t we cancel it? Why not quit? Same reason as always: because day-to-day, it’s easier to stick with something that we’re used to, that doesn’t make too many waves, that doesn’t hurt. As the Declaration of Independence warns us, “all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.”

Do you have the guts to quit when facing a c-sack?

The Valley of Death: that’s the goal of any competitor, to create a dip so long and so deep that the nascent competition can’t catch up. Microsoft does it. They’ve built so many relationships and established so many standards that it’s essentially inconceivable that someone will challenge Word or Excel, at least until the platform changes. They made it through the dip, though, and now they’re quick. In accounting software, it’s just as secure as Word is as a word processor. Make it through the competition’s barriers, and you get to be king for a while.

But wait, you say, isn’t Google going hard after Microsoft by creating web-based versions of spreadsheets and word processors? Yes, but even mighty Google knows that they can’t do that without changing the platform from the PC to the web. Microsoft has constructed a dip so deep and so expensive that it’s impossible to cross. But now, with a new platform, Google has a much easier path to follow. Apple’s done the same thing.

Difficulties of Scaling Up

Something in your garage, it’s difficult and expensive to buy an injection mold design, an integrated circuit, or ramp up for large-scale production. The time and effort and cost of ramping up your operation create the dip. The dip keeps the supply of stuff down and insulates those brave enough to invest in scaling up their production. Those struggling artists at the local craft fair are struggling because they don’t have the guts or the wherewithal to take their work to the next level. Sales dip. Most ideas get their start when one person starts selling it, selling the idea to stores, or to businesses, or to consumers, or even to voters. But the dip hits when you need to upgrade to a professional Salesforce and scale it up. In almost every field, the competitor that’s first with a big aggressive Salesforce has a huge advantage.

Educational and Career Challenges

Education dip. A career gets started as soon as you leave school, but the dip often hits when it’s time to go learn something new, to reinvent or rebuild your skills. A doctor who sacrifices a year of her life for a specialty reaps the rewards for decades afterward.

Risks and Investments

Risk dip. Bootstrappers learn the hard way that at some point they can’t pay for it all themselves, especially out of current income. It takes a risk to rent a bigger space or invest in new techniques. Successful entrepreneurs understand the difference between investing to get through the dip, a smart move, or investing in something that’s actually a risky crapshoot.

Relationship Building

Relationship dip. There are people and organizations that can help you later, but only if you invest the time and effort to work with them now, even though now is not necessarily the easy time for you to do it. That kid who started in the mailroom, who was always eager to do an errand for you or stay late to help out, she’s now the CEO. The relationships she built when it was difficult to do so paid off later. Those shortsighted people who are always eager for a favor or a break never managed to get through the relationship dip because they didn’t invest in relationships back when it was difficult but not urgent.

Conceptual Challenges

Conceptual dip. You got this far operating under one set of assumptions. Abandoning those assumptions and embracing a new, bigger set may be exactly what you need to do to get to the next level. The heroes who have reinvented institutions and industries, everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. to Richard Branson, from Zelma Watson George to Jacqueline Novag Gritz, all did it in exactly the same way, by working through a conceptual dip all the way to the other side.

Ego Management

Ego dip. When it’s all about you, it’s easier giving up control and leaning into the organization gives you leverage. Most people can’t do this; they can’t give up control or the spotlight. They get stuck in that dip.

Distribution Challenges

Distribution dips. Some retailers, local strip malls, the web, make it easy for your product to get distribution while others like Target require an investment from your organization that may just pay off. Getting your product into Walmart is far more likely to lead to huge sales than is putting it on the web. Why? Scarcity. Everyone is on the web, but getting into Walmart is hard.

Seizing Opportunities and Perseverance

With iTunes and the iPod, first, they took advantage of a new platform to destroy the Tower Records of the world. Then, instead of resting on their lead, Apple built all sorts of systems and benefits that make it extremely difficult for someone to persevere long enough to come out ahead at the other end. Professions do it as well; lawyers, for example, have continually increased how difficult it is to pass the bar exam, lengthening the dip and making life better on the other side for everyone who is already a lawyer.

Achieving Extraordinary Results

The big opportunity if you can get through the dip, if you can keep going when the system is expecting you to stop, you will achieve extraordinary results. People who make it through the dip are scarce indeed, so they generate more value. When you’re the best in the world, you share the benefits, the income, the attention, the privileges, the respect with just a handful of people or organizations or brands.

Importance of Persistence

That male magazine model with the great abs gets work precisely because so many people have quit in their quests to get what he’s got. You know this already; you’re not stupid, and you’ve noticed all your life that the big benefits occur to those who don’t quit. And it hasn’t made a difference so far. So why should you listen to me now? Simple, it’s about the story you tell yourself. You grew up believing that quitting is a moral failing, quitting feels like a go-down moment, a moment where you look yourself in the eye and blink. Of course, you are trying your best, but you just can’t do it. It’s that whole Vince Lombardi thing – if you were just a better person, you wouldn’t quit. I’d rather have you focus on quitting or not quitting as a go-up opportunity. It’s not about avoiding the humiliation of failure. Even more important, you can realize that quitting the stuff you don’t care about or the stuff you’re mediocre at, or better yet, quitting the C.D. sacks frees up your resources to obsess about the dips that matter. If you’re going to quit, quit before you start; reject the system, don’t play the game. If you realize you can’t be the best in the world, average is for losers.

Being Exceptional

Quitting at the right time is difficult; most of us don’t have the guts to quit. Worse, when faced with the dip, sometimes we don’t quit; instead, we get mediocre. The most common response to the dip is to play it safe, to do ordinary work, blameless work, work that’s beyond reproach. When faced with the dip, most people suck it up and try to average their way to success, which is precisely why so few people end up as the best in the world. To be a superstar, you must do something exceptional, not just survive the dip but use the dip as an opportunity to create something so extraordinary that people can’t help but talk about it, recommend it, and yes, choose it.

Avoiding Mediocrity

The next time you catch yourself being average, when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers. Am I being too harsh? Isn’t your time and your effort and your career and your reputation too valuable to squander on just being average? Average feels safe, but it’s not. It’s invisible, it’s the last choice, the path of least resistance. The temptation to be average is just another kind of quitting, the kind to be avoided. You deserve better than average. Serial quitters spend a lot of time in line observing the supermarket. Over the years, I’ve determined that there are three common checkout strategies at my local supermarket, maybe like yours. It usually has four or five checkouts open. If you watch carefully, you’ll see people adopting one of three strategies.

Checkout Strategies

The first is to pick the shortest line and get in it, stick with it no matter what. The second is to pick the shortest line and switch lines once, at a maximum, if something holds up your line, like the clueless person with a check but no check-cashing card. But that’s it, just one switch. The third is to pick the shortest line and keep scanning the other lines, switch lines if a shorter one appears, continue this process until you leave the store. The problem with the third strategy is obvious; every time you switch lines, you’re starting over in your search for a quick fix. You almost certainly waste time, and you definitely waste energy jumping back and forth.

Impact of Constant Switching

There are cues everywhere. Do you know an entrepreneur want who is on his sixth or twelfth new project? He jumps from one to another, and every time he hits an obstacle, he switches to a new, easier, better opportunity. And while he’s a seeker, he’s never going to get anywhere. He never gets anywhere because he’s always switching lines, never able to really run for it. While starting up is thrilling, it’s not until you get through the dip that your efforts pay off. Countless entrepreneurs have perfected the starting part but give up long before they finish paying their dues. The sad news is that when you start over, you get very little credit for how long you stood in line with your last great venture. This malady doesn’t afflict just entrepreneurs; advertisers who are always jumping from one agency to another or one medium to another end up wasting a fortune. If it takes ten impressions to make an impact and you’ve delivered eight, that switch is going to cost you a lot of time and money. Salespeople who quit, a well-reported study, probably apocryphal, found that the typical salesperson gives up after the fifth contact with a prospect. After five times, the salesperson figures she’s wasting her time and the prospect quits and moves on. Of course, the study reports.

Sales Strategies and Persistence

Is it true that people need to be closed constantly? That seven is a magic number, and that the key to selling is to be aggressive? I don’t think so. I don’t think the best salespeople are the ones who are always in your face, always asking for the order, always pushing. I think the lesson of the story is this: selling is about a transference of emotion, not a presentation of facts. If it were just a presentation of facts, then a PDF flyer or a website would be sufficient to make the phone ring.

Importance of Sincerity and Commitment

Prospects, that’s you if you’ve ever been sold something, are experts at sensing what’s on the salesperson’s mind. People have honed their salesperson radar; we’re really good at detecting sincerity or the lack of it. If a salesperson’s attitude is, “Hey, if this person doesn’t buy, there’s someone right down the street I can call on,” what’s projected is, “Hey, I’m not that serious about you having this product.” On the other hand, if a salesperson is there for the long run, committed to making a sale because it benefits the other person, that signal is sent loud and clear.

Strategic Decision Making in Sales

Please understand this: if you’re not able to get through the dip in an exceptional way, you must quit, and quit right now. Because if your order book is 80% filled with prospects where you just sort of show up, you’re not only wasting your time, you’re also stealing your energy from the 20% of the calls where you have a chance to create a breakthrough. Once again, getting through the dip is a valid strategy. It isn’t a good strategy because successful salespeople are annoying, though. Sticking through the dip is a great strategy because it changes the entire dynamic of the salesperson’s day. It is not a moral choice; it’s a strategic one. “I’m getting through this dip with you because it’s important to both of us” is the very best signal to send.

Market Acceptance and Persistence

Facing the dip, you may be sure that your product is the best in the world, but no one outside a tiny group cares at all. You’re busy pushing your new idea wherever it can go. Meanwhile, most consumers couldn’t care less about your idea or those fancy high-heeled shoes or some cutting-edge type of glue. Instead, they wait. They wait for something to be standardized, tested, inexpensive, and ready for prime time. Hence the dip of market acceptance.

Importance of Persistence in Various Fields

The marketers who get rewarded are the ones who don’t quit. They hunker down through the dip and galvanize and insulate and perfect their product while others keep looking for yet another quick hit. So while one publisher runs from author to author looking for an instant bestseller, another nurtures Dr. Seuss or Stephen King as he slowly builds an audience. While one nonprofit runs from grant maker to grant maker seeking funds for this project or that one, a successful nonprofit sticks with a consistent theme, showing up, paying its dues, focusing on just a few foundations until the money comes through.

Overcoming Hurdles in Job Seeking

Job seekers face the dip because Human Resources departments support it. HR doesn’t show up at your door and offer you a job; they set hurdles like submitting a resume or wearing a suit or flying to Cleveland as a way of screening out the folks who aren’t actually serious about a job.

Persistence in Business and Strategy

We’re seduced by the tales of actresses being discovered at the local drugstore or a classmate who got a fantastic job just by showing up at the college placement office. We see an author hit the big time after just one appearance on Oprah or a rock band getting signed after submitting a demo. It all seems easy and exciting. It’s easy to be seduced by the new money and the rush to the fresh. The problem is that this leads to both an addiction and a very short attention span.

Strategic Decision Making in Business

What business are you in? Yes, you should, you must quit a product or a feature or a design. You need to do it regularly if you’re going to grow and have the resources to invest in the right businesses. But no, you mustn’t quit a market or a strategy or a niche. The businesses we think of as overnight successes weren’t; we just didn’t notice them until they were well baked. Proctor and Gamble has killed hundreds of products. Starbucks killed their music CD burning stations. Social Security reform has been dropped a dozen times. Don’t fall in love with a tactic and defend it forever. Instead, decide once and for all whether you’re in a market or not, and if you are, get through that dip. The market wants to see you persist. It demands a signal from you that you’re serious, powerful, accepted.

Recognizing Dead Ends and Strategic Decision Making

The bulk of any market is made up of those folks in the middle of the bell curve, the ones who want to buy something proven and valued. Following a product all the way through the dip works because you’re reaching an ever larger part of the market. If your product isn’t working, if your service isn’t catching on, if you’re not even appealing to the crazy geeks who like the new stuff, you mustn’t persist with a tactic just because you feel stuck with it. Your strategy to be a trusted source in your chosen market can survive even if your product is canceled.

Rededication and Strategic Approaches

The opposite of quitting isn’t waiting around. No, the opposite of quitting is rededication. The opposite of quitting is an invigorated new strategy designed to break the problem apart. It’s a mistake to view the dip as static, to imagine that you are merely a passive passenger on a slow-moving boat ride, sitting there as you move through the doldrums of the dip. The dip is flexible; it responds to the effort you put into it. In fact, it’s quite likely in almost every case that aggressive action on your part can make the dip a lot worse or a lot better.

Leveraging Power in Decision Making

When the pain gets so bad that you’re ready to quit, you’ve set yourself up as someone with nothing to lose, and someone with nothing to lose has quite a bit of power. You can go for broke, challenge authority, attempt unattempted alternatives, lean into a problem so far that you might just lean right through it.

Short-Term Decisions vs. Long-Term Benefits

Quitting in the dip is usually a short-term decision and a bad one. When people quit, they are often focused on the short-term benefits. It’s better to stop. Short-term pain has more impact on most people than long-term benefits do, which is why it’s so important for you to amplify the long-term benefits of not quitting. You need to remind yourself of life at the other end of the dip because it’s easier to overcome the pain of yet another unsuccessful cold call if the reality of a successful sales career is more concrete.

Persisting Through Challenges

No one quits the Boston Marathon at Mile 25. Persistent people are able to visualize the idea of light at the end of the tunnel when others can’t see it. At the same time, the smartest people are realistic about not imagining light when there isn’t any.

Strategic Career Choices and Organizational Management

Winners understand that taking that pain now prevents a lot more pain later. The decision to quit or not is a simple evaluation: Is the pain of the dip worth the benefit of the light at the end of the tunnel? If you’re not going to get to number one, you might as well quit now. It’s okay to quit sometimes. In fact, it’s okay to quit often. You should quit if you’re on a dead-end path, if you’re facing a cliff.

Quitting for Success

Quit if the project you’re working on has a dip that isn’t worth the reward at the end, quitting the projects that don’t go anywhere is essential if you want to stick out the right ones. You don’t have the time or the passion or the resources to be the best in the world at both quitting a tactic versus quitting a strategy, yes I know it’s heretical but I’m advocating quitting, quitting often in fact not giving up and abandoning your long-term strategy wherever you might be using that strategy a career an income a relationship a sale but quitting the tactics that aren’t working getting off a c d sack is not a moral failing it’s just smart seeing a cliff coming far in advance isn’t a sign of weakness instead it represents real insight and bravery it frees up your energy for the dip that noise inside your head right at this moment my Clairvoyance tells me you’re having a conversation that involves a lot of rationalization you’re explaining to yourself why those c d sacks you’re in aren’t really dead ends they are you’re busy defending the mediocre work your organization does because it’s the best you can do under the circumstances it’s not you don’t want to quit it’s not fun it’s not easy so you haven’t but you should you must or you could just settle for being average quitting is an intelligent strategy deg just got another promotion he works for a software company in Indiana and over the last 14 years he’s had a wide range of jobs for the first seven or eight years Doug was in business development and sales he handled the Microsoft account for a while flying to Redmond Washington every 6 weeks or so it was hard on his family but he’s really focused and really good two years ago Doug got a huge promotion he was put in charge of his entire division 150 people the second biggest group in the company Doug attacked the job with Relish in addition to spending even more time on the road he did a great job of handling internal management issues a month ago for a variety of good reasons Doug got a sideways promotion same level but a new team of analysts report to him now he’s in charge of strategic alliances he’s well respected he’s done just about every job and he makes a lot of money imagine the conversation you could have with him you’ve been there a long time my friend Doug won’t buy it yes I’ve been here 14 years but I’ve had seven jobs when I got here we were a startup but now we’re a division of Cisco I’ve got new challenges and the commute is great go on interrupt him Doug needs to leave for a very simple reason he’s been branded everyone at the company has an expectation of who Doug is and what he can do working your way up from the mail room sounds sexy but in fact it’s entirely unlikely Doug has hit a plateau he’s not going to be challenged pushed or promoted to president Doug regardless of what he could actually accomplish has stopped evolving at least in the eyes of the people who matter if he leaves and joins another company he gets to reinvent himself no one in the new company will remember Young Doug from 10 years ago no they’ll treat Doug as the new Doug the Doug with an endless upside and little past our parents and grandparents believed you should stay at a job for 5 years 10 years or even your whole life but in a world where companies come and go where they grow from nothing to the Fortune 500 and then disappear all in a few years that’s just not possible here’s the deal and here’s what I told Doug the time to look for a new job is when you don’t need one the time to switch jobs is before it feels comfortable go switch challenge yourself get yourself a raise and a promotion you owe it to your career and your skills if your job is a c desac you have to quit or accept the fact that your career is over quitting is not the same as failing strategic quitting is a conscious decision you make based on the choices that are available to you if you realize you’re at a debt end compared with what you could be investing in quitting is not only a reasonable Choice it’s a smart one failing on the other hand means that your dream is over failing happens when you give up when there are no other options or when you quit so often that you’ve used up all your time and resources it’s easy to ring your hands about becoming a failure quitting smart though is a great way to avoid failing coping is a lousy alternative to quitting coping is what people do when they try to muddle through they cope with a bad job or a difficult task the problem with coping is that it never leads to exceptional performance mediocre work is rarely because of a lack of talent and often because of the cisac all coping does is waste your time and misdirect your energy if the best you can do is cope you’re better off quitting quitting is better than coping because quitting frees you up to excel at something else never quit what a spectacularly bad piece of advice it ranks up there with oh that’s a funny dirty joke let’s tell the teacher never quit never quit wetting your bed or that job you had at Burger King in high school never quit selling a product that is now obsolete wait a minute didn’t that coach say quitting was a bad idea actually quitting as a short-term strategy is a bad idea quitting for the longterm is an excellent idea I think the advice giver meant to say never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can’t deal with the stress of the moment now that’s good advice pride is the enemy of the smart quitter Richard ni and sacrificed tens of thousands of innocent lives on both sides when he refused to quit the Vietnam War the only reason he didn’t quit sooner Pride the very same Pride that keeps someone in the same career years after it has become unattractive and no fun the very same Pride that keeps a restaurant open long after it’s clear that business is just not going to pick up when you’re facing a cisac what’s your reason for sticking are you too proud to quit one reason people feel really good after they quit a dead- end project is that they discover that hurting one’s pride is not fatal you work up the courage to quit bracing yourself for the sound of your ego being ripped to shreds and then everything is okay if pride is the only thing keeping you from quitting if there’s no dip to get through you’re likely wasting an enormous amount of time and money defending something that will heal pretty quickly Harvard Medical School is not a reason to stick ignore some costs best-selling author Michael kryon quit as he was on his way to a career at the top of his profession when he gave up medicine kryon had already graduated from Harvard Medical School and done a post-doctoral fellowship study at the sock Institute for biological studies guaranteeing him a lucrative career as a doctor or as a researcher he traded it for the unpredictable life of an author kryon had no stomach for cutting people open and he decided he didn’t relish the future a medical career would bring him regardless of how successful he might become at it so he quit kryon saw that just because he had already gotten into Harvard already earned a fellowship already made it through the dipy didn’t have to spend the rest of his life doing something he didn’t enjoy in order to preserve his pride he stopped cold turkey and started over if he can quit can you three questions to ask before quitting if you’re thinking about quitting or not quitting then you’ve succeeded and so have I realizing that quitting is worth your focus and consideration is the first step to becoming the best in the

Strategic Quitting for Success

When it comes to quitting, the ones who decide in advance when they’re going to quit are often the most successful. You can always quit later, so wait until you’re done panicking to decide. When the pressure is greatest to compromise, to drop out, or to settle, your desire to quit should be at its lowest. The decision to quit is often made in the moment, but that’s exactly the wrong time to make such a critical decision.

Timing Matters

The reason so many of us quit in the dip is that without a compass or a plan, the easiest thing to do is to give up. While that might be the easiest path, it’s also the least successful one.

Influence and Persistence

Who are you trying to influence? Are you trying to succeed in a market, get a job, or train a muscle? If you’re considering quitting, it’s almost certainly because you’re not being successful at your current attempt to influence.

Influencing a Market vs. One Person

Influencing one person is like scaling a wall, but influencing a market is more like navigating a maze. Every step of progress in a market gets amplified, as people talk to each other and influence one another.

Measurable Progress

What sort of measurable progress are you making? In any endeavor, you’re either moving forward, falling behind, or standing still. Measurable progress doesn’t have to be grand; it can be subtle but needs to be more than just surviving.

The Value of Not Quitting

When you’re trying to influence an entire market, the value of not quitting is high. It’s cheaper and easier to build your foundation in one market than to jump from one to another until you find success.

Quitting a Job vs. Quitting Your Quest

Quitting a job doesn’t mean giving up on your quest to make a living, a difference, or an impact. A job is just a tactic, a way to get to what you really want. When your job hits a dead end, it makes sense to quit and take your quest to a bigger marketplace.

The Seduction of Not Quitting

The seduction of not quitting often comes from stories of persistence paying off across a market. However, sticking with a dead-end job or relationship rarely leads to sudden success.

Deciding in Advance

Decide in advance under what circumstances you’re willing to quit, and stick with it. Deciding when to quit before you start can be a key factor in achieving success.

Quitting strategically, rather than out of panic or frustration, can be a powerful tool for reaching your goals and achieving long-term success.

Preparing to Quit Strategically

Before the race, it’s crucial to outline the conditions that will cause you to stop and drop out. Making a decision based on how you feel at the moment can lead to the wrong choice. Therefore, outlining your quitting strategy before the discomfort sets in is essential.

Timing and Planning

If quitting is going to be a strategic decision enabling smart choices, then setting your limits before starting is powerful. Just as a smart venture capitalist pressures the board of directors to have a plan in case they run out of money, individuals and organizations should have a plan about when it’s time to quit.

Soft Tires Pick Your Dip

Consider the analogy of a bicycle tire. Adding just a few pounds of air to a flat tire doesn’t have much effect, but adding too much pressure can burst the tire. Similarly, entering a market that’s too big for the resources available can result in your message getting lost.

Resource Allocation

You have the power to change everything and create remarkable products and services. Don’t waste your resources by spreading them too thin or settling for mediocrity. Use all your resources to become the best in the world and tackle the biggest possible dip.

Asking the Right Questions

Before deciding to quit, ask yourself crucial questions:

• Is this a dip, a cliff, or a c dck?
• How can I change a c dck into a dip?
• Will my persistence pay off in the long run?
• Do my actions spill over into the entire marketplace?
• When should I quit?
• If I quit this task, will it increase my ability to get through the dip on something more important?

Examples of Excellence

The transcript ends with a list of examples of excellence, emphasizing the importance of striving to be the best in the world in various fields.

Quitting strategically, asking the right questions, and leveraging your resources effectively can lead to success and excellence in your endeavors.