Zen-ish Thoughts About Quitting

I have played thousands of games of backgammon. My rating as a player is not even slightly impressive, but more to the present point, my rating was stuck in the same place for a long time.

Analysis showed that my movement of pieces around the board was good, and that the weakest part of my game was how I handled doubling. If you don't know anything about backgammon or doubling, I should explain – the feedback meant either that I was not inviting my opponent to double the bet in situations where I should have, or that I was accepting my opponent's invitation to double the bet when I should have declined, or both. If one player offers to double the bet in backgammon, and the other player declines, they are not only declining to double the bet. They are also explicitly allowing their opponent to win the game at that moment at the current bet level. That is, they are quitting.

Between doubling more aggressively and declining the invitation more often, the easier change to implement is to decline more often, so I decided to try that first and see what that did to my player rating. This was the first time my rating moved up in ages. I want to say this in a particular way: the thing that raised my overall rating as a player was to quit more often.

Imagine trying to sell that in a job interview: "I am getting better and better at knowing when to quit!"

That is not a good way to get a job, but it is sometimes the most available winning move. A Silicon Valley exec got a lot of air play for saying that having backup plans was a very bad idea because it meant you were prepared to fail, and failure is unacceptable. Hmm. As an experienced Silicon Valley exec myself, as an engineer, and as a sane person, I would say that "failure" – which is what Silicon Valley calls getting anything other than ideal results every single time – is a commonplace event, and the only thing bad about it is being killed by it because you were too stupid or too arrogant to have a backup plan.

Knowing when to quit what you are doing and do something else instead is wisdom.

This doesn't mean I should not also learn how to judge when to offer a double more aggressively, and it might be that will matter even more. But it remains, that the most available option that made things better was to know when to quit. Probably not the only move, maybe not the best move, but a move I could make that made things better.

How often have you stayed in a relationship too long? Should have quit sooner. How often have you stayed at a job for too long? Should have quit sooner. How often have you tolerated a behavior in yourself or someone else that should have been stopped long ago? Should have quit tolerating that behavior sooner.

Compared to my personal norm, this essay is incredibly brief, but I'll leave it at that. The rest is up to you. What are you going to quit today or tomorrow?