Don't Evaluate "Quit Criteria" on a Monday

A double reminder not to let emotion rule your business.

Photo by Jackson Simmer on Unsplash

Several years ago, I coached a psychologist and writer named Tracy Cleantis on two books, one of which was called The Next Happy. Her main point was that the “never, ever give up” mentality often did more harm than good, as people hammered away at goals and dreams they were never going to reach. She talked about how letting go of something (and finding your next happy) can often be the most courageous act.

I recently learned even more about that idea by reading the book Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke— a book I was given as homework after a podcast with Rachel Herron about being stuck finishing a big course curriculum project.

Duke is a speaker and consultant on decision strategy, a former professional poker player, World Series of Poker winner, and the co-founder of The Alliance for Decision Education. Quit is a book about how and when to make the decision to quit something, which she contends most of us make far too late far too often.

If we quit things sooner, we can put our energy into the things that are working rather than the things that are not.

A core piece of Duke’s training is to set quit criteria, which, she writes, are “...literally criteria for killing a project or changing your mind or cutting your losses.” 

It’s what all book coaches need to think about in terms of our packages and our pricing, our initiatives, and our big ideas.

“The best quitting criteria combine two things,” Duke says, “A state and a date. A state is just what it sounds like, an objective, measurable condition you or your project is in, a benchmark that you have hit or missed. A date is the when.”

For a book coach, quit critiera might look like this:

• “If I do not sell six seats in my new live pricing workshop by June 30, I will not run it.”

• “If I do three more manuscript edits in the next three months that take me more than ten hours (and make my life too chaotic), I will stop offering them.”

• “If I start a newsletter and don’t get 100 followers by Halloween, I will move to Substack.”

Quit criteria can go both ways — they don’t have to be negative. Here’s an example of positive quit criteria:

• “If I sell five 1:1 coaching packages at $499 by October 1, I will quit that price point and raise my rates to $599.”

Using quit criteria as you test and iterate within your business ecosystem helps you take the emotion out of decisions and neutralize the confirmation bias you might have that everything is going to get better…tomorrow.

I love this concept so much. I have relied on it for years without knowing what it was called or how powerful it is, but now that I know those things, I am attaching quit criteria to everything.

Yesterday, a Monday, I added a caveat to my process.

Mondays can be brutal. I am more often overwhelmed on a Monday than on any other day.

Yesterday, I said to my husband, “That’s it. I’m quitting ____________. I’m not waiting for the time period to be over. I’m done.”

He just smiled and said, “Don’t evaluate quit criteria on a Monday.”

I laughed, because the whole goal of quit criteria is to take the emotion out of decision-making, and somehow I still let it sneak in.

I’ll revisit my quit criteria for that particular program when the full time period is over and it’s not a Monday.