I run Ultra marathons a couple of times a year. 50-100 milers. Some of the nicest people I have ever met are out doing the same thing. A lot of ex addicts and people who have been through some sort of trauma. No egos. Just wonderful fragile people who are hard as nails. Replacing mental anguish with physical pain.
This is summed up by a fellow runner I met who had a tatoo that said, “When the devil whispers "you cannot withstand the storm". The warrior replies "I am the storm".
I think it comes down to choice. If you don't have a choice then all you have is hope. Now, if hope was something that is a positive then what was it doing in Pandoras box with all that evil? If you've had some terrible diagnosis or you are chained to a radiator in a cellar in Beirut then all you have is hope.
Nietzsche said. "Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man's torment."
Christopher Hitchens, in one if his last interviews before succumbing to cancer was asked what were his regrets. He said ''In life you choose your regrets''.
I am going to try and die with my boots on.
When the devil whispers in my ear that I should quit because the Storm will consume me, then my reply will be ''I am the storm''
"All decisions are personalized. Perhaps they don't yield to generalizable principles." I think that's true. Because value judgements are also highly subjective. What's a good outcome? What's a bad one? A successful, lucrative, high-powered career may mean poor health and little time for friends, family, or simple pleasures. Likewise, a balanced, peaceful life may mean living with the knowledge that you walked away from a lot more money or notoriety.
RCTs are designed to measure hard endpoints, not make subjective value judgements. For that we have philosophy, spirituality, and contemplation. In addition, even if there was a universally agreed-upon way to appraise an outcome as good or bad, any particular time point at which you chose to measure the outcome would not be the end of the story. Like the famous parable:
A farmer and his son had a beloved horse who helped the family earn a living. One day, the horse ran away and their neighbors exclaimed, “Your horse ran away, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
A few days later, the horse returned home, leading a few wild horses back to the farm as well. The neighbors shouted out, “Your horse has returned, and brought several horses home with him. What great luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
Later that week, the farmer’s son was trying to break one of the horses and she threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. The neighbors cried, “Your son broke his leg, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
A few weeks later, soldiers from the national army marched through town, recruiting all boys for the army. They did not take the farmer’s son, because he had a broken leg. The neighbors shouted, “Your boy is spared, what tremendous luck!” To which the farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”
All I could think of are the immortal words of Geddy Lee, et. al. "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice ". Short of a time machine, there is absolutely no way to answer the question "Should I stay or should I go". The Clash couldn't figure it out.
This kind of question strikes me as something that can never be randomized because there are too many variables. Every single case is unique and complex. Of course there are things that are not worth gritting out, and it has little to do with how much you "want" to do them. There are other things that are very much worth gritting out even if you don't want to do them--like quitting hard drugs. The point is, every decision we make comes down to a unique combination of our genes and environment, risks and benefits. No podcast can make that decision for me, nor any randomized trial.
Interesting article, that reminded me of a book I read last year called, "Thinking in Bets," by Annie Duke. She was a PhD quitter, as I recall, due to a major health issue, who moved west to Wyoming to live with a brother during her recovery. He was a professional gambler and got her interested in it. She started going to professional games and tournaments and developed skill at it - I think I remember she said she won a number of fairly big ones. She developed some much broader approaches to decision making that revolve around the difference having some "skin in the game" gives one's perspective, and how the most successful gamblers understand this better than most people do. Her discussion of how this applies to the kind of decisions probably discussed in that podcast (which I haven't listened to) would probably add an interesting dimension to it.
I believe both quitting and grit can be the correct strategy at times, however most successful people would not be successful if they had quit. In fact, I would say the most important key to success is to not quit. A successful marriage, a successful diet or fitness program, a successful job, or education all take showing up day after day and sometimes slogging through when you want to quit. I do recognize there are times when the goal is wrong and you need to quit that one, but you first need to understand how you got there so it doesn’t happen again.
To quit or not depends on your definition/perception of success I think. When I graduated from college with a degree in music therapy, I had dreams of working with MI teens in a hospital setting, but there was a recession, hospitals were laying off and even Arby's refsed to hire me. After sleeping on a couch for a year, I was offered a job in corrections, specifically kids jail, where I used my skills to keep kids busy and avoid fights. After that, I wrote investigations for the Court for some years and interviewed hundreds of MI adults who were eventually convicted of murder, rape, robbery, etc. as well as lesser offenses. Eventually, I worked with MI adults, who sometimes needed the correctional leverage to begin to buy into changes that didn't conform to their idea of normal (yet). I was able to spend sometimes lengthy periods of time with people who wouldn't have been able to keep an appointment at a clinic and whose major problems always seemed to occur at 5 o'clock on Friday. There were literally hundreds of times I wanted to quit, was encouraged to go to law school by well meaning people and couldn't bear hearing one more trauma story, but I prayed and received strength from God to continue to work the misaion I was called to. i say all that to say I have no regrets about the career that was never my choice. Choices made with no communication with God are often doomed to fail imho.
Perhaps the biggest problem here is the idea that you have to get the decision right, and you can't undo it. With marriage and divorce and friends, there's a lot of emotional trauma that can come with staying or breaking these bonds. But when it comes to your job, your sport, your car, your .... Make a decision, and quit worrying about making the perfect one. Perhaps that should be the next book "Ok is good enough." Oh wait, think it's already been written.
I have pretty good grit credentials, with 100 marathons/ultramarathons completed, but I don't think Duckworth's advice is realistic, nor does Leavitts argument makes much sense to me
Everyone has plenty of grit. But each decision rests on the particulars
People rationalize these kinds of decisions "ex post facto" all the time. Our brains continually look around the world in the present moment and seek to make sense of it. As such, "rationalizing" feels like "thinking," but it is not the same process. The real truth is that many of life's most important decisions are made impulsively, but after the fact, we rationalize that we must have chosen quite carefully and quite well when we are happy with the result.
Choice of a life partner, for example, cannot be attributed to purely rational, predicted motivations and logical thought processes. Sure, it feels this way, but what we know about hormones, genetics, emotions, social conditioning, and more all swirl into smoothie of chemical reactions we call "love." It is supposed to produce a response that feels existential to ourselves because, evolutionarily, such choices are existential to the species. I don't look at my wife and think, "Wow! You are an amazing brew of irrational contradictions!" Instead, I love her. I have a passion for her that extends to our blended family and nine grandkids. Is that the "right choice?"
Well, I split up with her 30 years ago and we reunited 10 years ago. Would we have had better lives if we stuck together? Our emotions tell us, "Yes!" and our brains handily rationalize that. However, we split up because we made each other miserable as young people. Perhaps we needed the time apart to become the people who could stay together later in life. We can make endless rationalizations of our current conditions because ... that is what brains do.
In the end, to a large degree, happiness comes from choosing contentment in your choices no matter how impulsive or flawed they were. We seek books to bolster our rationalizations of leaving or staying, but (so far) the future is not reliably predictable. Until the moment it is predictable, we are all just making our best guesses and trying to cope with whatever the outcomes may be.
Such a meaty topic and such a great discussion! It brings up so many great topics (intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation and cognitive dissonance, among others) but I’ll focus on one: The primary end point of this study, “happiness”. I’m always suspicious of this end point due to both the squishy nature of “happiness” and the validity of it as a goal.
I’ll start with the squishiness: some studies suggest that, in the United States, couples with children are less happy than those without. Another study suggests that the happiest group in the US are conservative women. Other data suggest that conservatives have 40% more children than liberals. For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that, of the three points, the birth rate data is the easiest to measure and more likely to be accurate. What then are we to make of the conflicting results of the first two that the third implies?
Even if “happiness” were not squishy, is that actually the right end point? Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” Viktor Frankl takes one on a deep dive into the same idea in “Man’s Search for Meaning”.
To be clear, I don’t believe that “meaning” is any less squishy than “happiness”; it might not even be a better end point. My bias is toward “meaning” but I’m open to having my mind changed. However, without a clear and accurate way of measuring the correct end point, all the RCTs in the world won’t move us in the right direction.
“In the absence of this, how do we make decisions? Probably, we all do the same. We talk to people we know and trust. We make lists of pros and cons, if not on paper, then in our minds. And we have no idea if our process is optimal or suboptimal.”
Vinay is a big fan of randomized trials (for everything). But they are not easy to do. They are expensive to do. They are far from perfect. And the results may not apply to me because I am unique in so many ways. See:
At the end of the day, we need to use a judicious combination of personal experience, anecdotal evidence, observational evidence, and randomized (controlled) evidence, to make important decisions in life.
I haven't listened to the podcast you refer to, but did listen to a conversation between Annie Duke (Quit) and David Epstein (Range - I'm a big fan - link here: youtube.com/watch?v=R4VayExHtWo). As someone who struggles with decisions I am looking forward to reading Quit. Generally, though, I think there often aren't "right" decisions. There isn't one path any of us are meant to walk on. Duke's "Quit" seems in this vein (as is Epstein's "Range") - go on and try new thing to see how they go. If not great - there will be other things to try. In everything, you will learn. Regardless of where you are, be good to those in your sphere and offer your gifts to the world; it simply may not matter if one grits or quits if doing those things.
I run Ultra marathons a couple of times a year. 50-100 milers. Some of the nicest people I have ever met are out doing the same thing. A lot of ex addicts and people who have been through some sort of trauma. No egos. Just wonderful fragile people who are hard as nails. Replacing mental anguish with physical pain.
This is summed up by a fellow runner I met who had a tatoo that said, “When the devil whispers "you cannot withstand the storm". The warrior replies "I am the storm".
I think it comes down to choice. If you don't have a choice then all you have is hope. Now, if hope was something that is a positive then what was it doing in Pandoras box with all that evil? If you've had some terrible diagnosis or you are chained to a radiator in a cellar in Beirut then all you have is hope.
Nietzsche said. "Zeus did not want man to throw his life away, no matter how much the other evils might torment him, but rather to go on letting himself be tormented anew. To that end, he gives man hope. In truth, it is the most evil of evils because it prolongs man's torment."
Christopher Hitchens, in one if his last interviews before succumbing to cancer was asked what were his regrets. He said ''In life you choose your regrets''.
I am going to try and die with my boots on.
When the devil whispers in my ear that I should quit because the Storm will consume me, then my reply will be ''I am the storm''
"All decisions are personalized. Perhaps they don't yield to generalizable principles." I think that's true. Because value judgements are also highly subjective. What's a good outcome? What's a bad one? A successful, lucrative, high-powered career may mean poor health and little time for friends, family, or simple pleasures. Likewise, a balanced, peaceful life may mean living with the knowledge that you walked away from a lot more money or notoriety.
RCTs are designed to measure hard endpoints, not make subjective value judgements. For that we have philosophy, spirituality, and contemplation. In addition, even if there was a universally agreed-upon way to appraise an outcome as good or bad, any particular time point at which you chose to measure the outcome would not be the end of the story. Like the famous parable:
A farmer and his son had a beloved horse who helped the family earn a living. One day, the horse ran away and their neighbors exclaimed, “Your horse ran away, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
A few days later, the horse returned home, leading a few wild horses back to the farm as well. The neighbors shouted out, “Your horse has returned, and brought several horses home with him. What great luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
Later that week, the farmer’s son was trying to break one of the horses and she threw him to the ground, breaking his leg. The neighbors cried, “Your son broke his leg, what terrible luck!” The farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not.”
A few weeks later, soldiers from the national army marched through town, recruiting all boys for the army. They did not take the farmer’s son, because he had a broken leg. The neighbors shouted, “Your boy is spared, what tremendous luck!” To which the farmer replied, “Maybe so, maybe not. We’ll see.”
All I could think of are the immortal words of Geddy Lee, et. al. "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice ". Short of a time machine, there is absolutely no way to answer the question "Should I stay or should I go". The Clash couldn't figure it out.
This kind of question strikes me as something that can never be randomized because there are too many variables. Every single case is unique and complex. Of course there are things that are not worth gritting out, and it has little to do with how much you "want" to do them. There are other things that are very much worth gritting out even if you don't want to do them--like quitting hard drugs. The point is, every decision we make comes down to a unique combination of our genes and environment, risks and benefits. No podcast can make that decision for me, nor any randomized trial.
My step son quits a job every month. Makes me absolutely ill.
Whatever development that helps an younger adult stick to it through some difficult circumstances is missing in him.
Interesting article, that reminded me of a book I read last year called, "Thinking in Bets," by Annie Duke. She was a PhD quitter, as I recall, due to a major health issue, who moved west to Wyoming to live with a brother during her recovery. He was a professional gambler and got her interested in it. She started going to professional games and tournaments and developed skill at it - I think I remember she said she won a number of fairly big ones. She developed some much broader approaches to decision making that revolve around the difference having some "skin in the game" gives one's perspective, and how the most successful gamblers understand this better than most people do. Her discussion of how this applies to the kind of decisions probably discussed in that podcast (which I haven't listened to) would probably add an interesting dimension to it.
I believe both quitting and grit can be the correct strategy at times, however most successful people would not be successful if they had quit. In fact, I would say the most important key to success is to not quit. A successful marriage, a successful diet or fitness program, a successful job, or education all take showing up day after day and sometimes slogging through when you want to quit. I do recognize there are times when the goal is wrong and you need to quit that one, but you first need to understand how you got there so it doesn’t happen again.
What, pray tell, does Yuval Harari offer in the way of "self improvement"?
Advice on how to own nothing and be happy?
How to go happily to the furnace when scheduled for recycling by our masters?
How to convince ourselves we always enjoyed eating the bugs?
Or are we talking about a different Harari and I'm putting my foot in my mouth? It's been known to happen.
To quit or not depends on your definition/perception of success I think. When I graduated from college with a degree in music therapy, I had dreams of working with MI teens in a hospital setting, but there was a recession, hospitals were laying off and even Arby's refsed to hire me. After sleeping on a couch for a year, I was offered a job in corrections, specifically kids jail, where I used my skills to keep kids busy and avoid fights. After that, I wrote investigations for the Court for some years and interviewed hundreds of MI adults who were eventually convicted of murder, rape, robbery, etc. as well as lesser offenses. Eventually, I worked with MI adults, who sometimes needed the correctional leverage to begin to buy into changes that didn't conform to their idea of normal (yet). I was able to spend sometimes lengthy periods of time with people who wouldn't have been able to keep an appointment at a clinic and whose major problems always seemed to occur at 5 o'clock on Friday. There were literally hundreds of times I wanted to quit, was encouraged to go to law school by well meaning people and couldn't bear hearing one more trauma story, but I prayed and received strength from God to continue to work the misaion I was called to. i say all that to say I have no regrets about the career that was never my choice. Choices made with no communication with God are often doomed to fail imho.
Perhaps the biggest problem here is the idea that you have to get the decision right, and you can't undo it. With marriage and divorce and friends, there's a lot of emotional trauma that can come with staying or breaking these bonds. But when it comes to your job, your sport, your car, your .... Make a decision, and quit worrying about making the perfect one. Perhaps that should be the next book "Ok is good enough." Oh wait, think it's already been written.
I have pretty good grit credentials, with 100 marathons/ultramarathons completed, but I don't think Duckworth's advice is realistic, nor does Leavitts argument makes much sense to me
Everyone has plenty of grit. But each decision rests on the particulars
https://newramblerreview.com/book-reviews/psychology/there-s-grit-and-then-there-s-true-grit
People rationalize these kinds of decisions "ex post facto" all the time. Our brains continually look around the world in the present moment and seek to make sense of it. As such, "rationalizing" feels like "thinking," but it is not the same process. The real truth is that many of life's most important decisions are made impulsively, but after the fact, we rationalize that we must have chosen quite carefully and quite well when we are happy with the result.
Choice of a life partner, for example, cannot be attributed to purely rational, predicted motivations and logical thought processes. Sure, it feels this way, but what we know about hormones, genetics, emotions, social conditioning, and more all swirl into smoothie of chemical reactions we call "love." It is supposed to produce a response that feels existential to ourselves because, evolutionarily, such choices are existential to the species. I don't look at my wife and think, "Wow! You are an amazing brew of irrational contradictions!" Instead, I love her. I have a passion for her that extends to our blended family and nine grandkids. Is that the "right choice?"
Well, I split up with her 30 years ago and we reunited 10 years ago. Would we have had better lives if we stuck together? Our emotions tell us, "Yes!" and our brains handily rationalize that. However, we split up because we made each other miserable as young people. Perhaps we needed the time apart to become the people who could stay together later in life. We can make endless rationalizations of our current conditions because ... that is what brains do.
In the end, to a large degree, happiness comes from choosing contentment in your choices no matter how impulsive or flawed they were. We seek books to bolster our rationalizations of leaving or staying, but (so far) the future is not reliably predictable. Until the moment it is predictable, we are all just making our best guesses and trying to cope with whatever the outcomes may be.
Such a meaty topic and such a great discussion! It brings up so many great topics (intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation and cognitive dissonance, among others) but I’ll focus on one: The primary end point of this study, “happiness”. I’m always suspicious of this end point due to both the squishy nature of “happiness” and the validity of it as a goal.
I’ll start with the squishiness: some studies suggest that, in the United States, couples with children are less happy than those without. Another study suggests that the happiest group in the US are conservative women. Other data suggest that conservatives have 40% more children than liberals. For the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that, of the three points, the birth rate data is the easiest to measure and more likely to be accurate. What then are we to make of the conflicting results of the first two that the third implies?
Even if “happiness” were not squishy, is that actually the right end point? Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” Viktor Frankl takes one on a deep dive into the same idea in “Man’s Search for Meaning”.
To be clear, I don’t believe that “meaning” is any less squishy than “happiness”; it might not even be a better end point. My bias is toward “meaning” but I’m open to having my mind changed. However, without a clear and accurate way of measuring the correct end point, all the RCTs in the world won’t move us in the right direction.
“In the absence of this, how do we make decisions? Probably, we all do the same. We talk to people we know and trust. We make lists of pros and cons, if not on paper, then in our minds. And we have no idea if our process is optimal or suboptimal.”
Trust in the Lord; He has the answers.
Vinay is a big fan of randomized trials (for everything). But they are not easy to do. They are expensive to do. They are far from perfect. And the results may not apply to me because I am unique in so many ways. See:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28710065/
At the end of the day, we need to use a judicious combination of personal experience, anecdotal evidence, observational evidence, and randomized (controlled) evidence, to make important decisions in life.
https://csndrcnsjrrmvhnb.quora.com/The-nature-of-empirical-evidence-in-medicine
I haven't listened to the podcast you refer to, but did listen to a conversation between Annie Duke (Quit) and David Epstein (Range - I'm a big fan - link here: youtube.com/watch?v=R4VayExHtWo). As someone who struggles with decisions I am looking forward to reading Quit. Generally, though, I think there often aren't "right" decisions. There isn't one path any of us are meant to walk on. Duke's "Quit" seems in this vein (as is Epstein's "Range") - go on and try new thing to see how they go. If not great - there will be other things to try. In everything, you will learn. Regardless of where you are, be good to those in your sphere and offer your gifts to the world; it simply may not matter if one grits or quits if doing those things.