Think Like a Freak

The final chapter discusses quitting and why it’s so hard for people. We’ve been conditioned to believe that failure is bad and makes one a loser. However, as the authors write, “There is in fact a huge upside to quitting when done right, and we suggest you give it a try” (190).

First, they discuss why people don’t quit, beginning with the stigma involved. A negative view of failure is ingrained in our culture, so we learn early on that quitting is bad. They quote a 1941 speech Winston Churchill gave at his old boarding school, in which he exhorted the boys to never give up no matter how small the stakes, to illustrate this conventional view of quitting.

Second, there is the idea of sunk costs. People reason that when they’ve already invested a certain amount of time, energy, or money into something, they must see it through to completion. Finally, people don’t think enough about opportunity costs, which are the costs (time, energy, money) involved in not doing something else while you’re occupied with a failing endeavor.

Levitt and Dubner admit that they quit about nine out of every 10 of their projects. They see failure as an important form of feedback and tell the story of a company that actually celebrates it. Intellectual Ventures, a high-tech firm, tries to teach its employees how to “fail well” by minimizing costs. Many ideas don’t pan out, but wasting a lot of time and money on them means fewer resources available for successful ideas. Geoff Deane, who runs the company’s lab, says that “if we try to spend ten thousand dollars on our failures instead of ten million dollars, we’ll get the opportunity to do a lot more things” (194). That’s why he throws a party—kind of like a wake—for projects that fail but don’t eat up resources. He wants his staff to feel okay about that kind of failure.

Stigmatizing failure makes people avoid it at all costs, even when those costs are enormous. An infamous example of this is the space shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. The weather just preceding the launch date was unusually cold for Florida, where the launch took place, and there were concerns that it could affect an important seal called an O-ring. The launch had already been postponed once, and NASA was eager to go. One engineer at the company that made the O-ring advised against it, but he was overruled by the company’s executives. The launch went ahead as planned, the O-rings failed (allowing hot gasses to escape from the rocket boosters), and the Challenger exploded, killing all seven crew members.

The key is how to decide when to stick with something and when to quit. None of us can see the future to know how something will turn out. There is some empirical evidence that quitting a seemingly impossible task is both mentally and physically beneficial, so the authors tried a kind of experiment. They set up a website that invited people to let them make an important decision for them by flipping a coin. Over 40,000 people responded, flipping coins to answer questions like whether to quit their job or break up with a significant other. They later reported whether it made them happier. The results were mixed; the experiment did not prove that quitting always makes one feel better—but neither did it reinforce the stereotype that quitting makes one feel terrible.

The authors end by reviewing their own life histories and the many things they quit, in terms of education and career paths, that led them to where they are today. They conclude that quitting—being unafraid to go against the grain and think differently—lies at the heart of thinking like a Freak.