Freakonomics Radio - 42. The Upside of Quitting

Episode Date: September 28, 2011

You know the saying: a winner never quits and a quitter never wins. To which Freakonomics Radio says … Are you sure?

I'd like you to stop whatever you're doing right now. No, no, I don't mean like stop so you can give your full attention to this radio show. I mean, honestly, radio is the perfect medium for multitasking, unless maybe you're using a chainsaw or something. What I mean is stop whatever you're doing, as in doing with your life. Maybe it's your job. Maybe it's a relationship that's curdled. Maybe there's some dream project you've been working on so long you can't even remember what got you all heated up about it in the first place. I want to encourage you to just quit.

Or at least think about quitting. Why? Well, because everybody else is always saying the opposite. Nothing is over until we decide it is. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? German? Forget it, he's rolling. It's become so ingrained, we don't even think about it anymore. You know, a quitter never wins and a winner never quits. You know what I think when I hear people say that? I think, are you sure? From WNYC and APM American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio.

Today, the upside of quitting. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. So I hang out with a lot of economists. Yeah, I know you're envious, but there are two things that they love to talk about that will help us understand quitting. One is called sunk costs and the other is opportunity costs. Sunk cost is about the past. It's the time or money or sweat equity that you've put into something which makes it hard to abandon. Opportunity cost is about the future. It means that for every hour or dollar you spend on one thing, you're giving up the opportunity to spend that hour or dollar on something else, something that might make your life better. If only you weren't so worried about the sunk cost.

If only you could quit. Let's start with a story of a woman we'll call Allie. Back in 1999, when she was about 25, Allie's life was already what most people would consider pretty successful. I was working for a Fortune 500 large company. What kind of work were you doing? Industrial computer programming. What kind of money were you making then? You know, $60,000, $70,000 a year. And you were living where? I was living in Texas. Okay, so $60,000 or $70,000 as a 25-year-old living in Texas goes a pretty long way. Oh, for sure. That sounds pretty good.

And how did you like to spend your money generally? I think like most 25-year-old women, you know, shoes and, you know, I had a nice place to live and a decent car to drive. And how did you like the job? I never loved it. I am more of a social person and it requires long, long periods of sitting at a computer desk talking to nobody. I understand that you ended up quitting this job in your new pursuit. Did you have to take a big pay cut? The new job paid way better. Way better, like 50% more or twice as much?

Yeah, more. Three times as much, four times as much? Yeah, somewhere around there. Somewhere around four times as much? Yeah, somewhere around there. Somewhere around four times as much? Yeah, maybe even more. That means you must have had to work way more hours than you'd worked as a computer programmer then, right? This is what was so great about it. I had to work a lot less. It must have been very, very, very difficult or unpleasant work then? Oh, no. I enjoyed my work, and I enjoyed my free time.

And, of course, the extra money allowed me to do a lot of the things that I wasn't able to do before. So tell me, what was this new work that you found? The new job that I found was I was a high-end escort. They paid somewhere between $350 to $500 an hour. In retrospect, how do you feel about that decision back then to quit that solid, steady, fairly good-paying job for the life of a high-end escort? You know, of course, it's always scary to leave behind something that's legit and go with something

that maybe isn't considered that. You know, I really enjoyed it. I know that it was the right decision for me. For me, I don't have a problem with having sex with strangers, but it wasn't something that I felt was demoralizing. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed my customers. I enjoyed the kindness, and I enjoyed every part of it. All right, so we're probably starting off on the wrong foot here. I encourage you to think about quitting, and the first person we hear from quit a perfectly good job to become a hooker. But hear me out.

My thesis is simple. In our zeal to tough things out, to keep our nose to the grindstone, in our zeal to win, we underestimate the upside of quitting. Now, full disclosure here. I am a serial quitter. I've quit a dream job with the New York Times. I quit my childhood dream of being a rock star. I even quit a religion.

We'll get to my quits later. First, here's someone who made headlines when he quit. Well, I decided – I mean, this was long in coming. I was feeling more and more miserable about not seeing my kids. It was weighing on me to a greater and greater extent. I made the decision that shortly after the election, I would leave. And then one day I went into the Oval Office and explained to the president that I just felt that I had no choice.

He was very understanding about it. That's Robert Reich. He was the U.S. Secretary of Labor during President Clinton's first term. He helped put in place the Family and Medical Leave Act. He raised the minimum wage. On his watch, unemployment fell below 5 percent, the lowest it had been in 20 years. Now, it's hard to say how effective any one person in Washington really is. But Time magazine named Reich one of the 10 best cabinet members of the 20th century.

And then Reich quit. But then the question for me was, well, how do I alert my employees and the segment of the public that felt that they were relying on me in some way. How did I handle it publicly? It's a delicate matter. I decided that I would write an op-ed for the New York Times. My personal family leave act. I had been responsible for implementing the family medical leave act that actually was passed years before. And it seemed to me important to say to men as well as women that it is OK to leave your job.

Here, as Reich wrote it, was his dilemma. Quote, you love your job and you love your family and you desperately want more of both. His wife and two teenage sons were back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he was, well, he could have been anywhere. You know, the other cabinet officers go to wonderful locations around the world, Paris and London and Shanghai and elsewhere. Secretary of Labor goes to Toledo, Ohio, or maybe St. Louis if it's really a great day. The funny thing is, no one believed Reich quit because he actually wanted to spend more time with his family. That's what CEOs say when they're booted.

But people, especially male people, don't quit White House jobs to do that. But Reich really meant it. As he saw it, there was a big upside to quitting. It was exactly the right move. I think if I had not done it, I would have regretted it all my life. I wouldn't have spent any time. I mean the boys then would have gone off to college, off to their careers. I just wouldn't have those years.

At the same time, I think I was fooling myself a little bit in thinking that young teenage boys would drop everything when their father came home and say, oh, dad, it's great to have you. Let's play. No, they were very happy to have me there. But then they said, but dad, we're going off with our friends. So I kind of would trail around after them a little bit with my metaphoric tail between my legs and try to say, well, wouldn't you like to play? Wouldn't you like, how about going to a baseball game? Robert Reich quit what was for him a dream job, running the Department of Labor of the United States. But tell me the truth. When you were a kid, did you dream of running the Department of Labor?

Or maybe you had a dream that sounded more like this. You get a phone call that says, how does it feel to be the next member of the Houston Astros? And you just get, it's a dream come true. So I ended up signing, got some money to pay for school, and went straight to Martinsville at 18. That's Justin Humphries. Not long ago, he was considered one of the best young baseball players in the country, a big power hitter from a suburb of Houston. Getting drafted by the hometown Astros was especially sweet,

and they threw in some money for education for later. But Humphreys wasn't thinking about that. He had one goal. To make the majors. So he went off to the Astros minor league team in Martinsville, Virginia. And then more teams in Kentucky, Louisiana, Florida, New Jersey. But not, you may have noticed, Houston. He hit pretty well, but he hurt his wrist and then his knee.

And in 2009, at the ripe age of 27, Humphreys quit baseball. Now, only 11% of the kids who get drafted each year make the majors, but probably close to 100% of them think they will. Humphreys, even before he quit for good, started back in school at a junior college in Texas. He wound up transferring to Columbia University, where he took a sociology course with a professor named Sudhir Venkatesh. You may recognize that name. We wrote about his exploits in Freakonomics. As a grad student in Chicago, Venkatesh embedded himself with a crack gang and got access to their financial records. We wrote about him in Super Freakonomics, too.

He did an extensive survey of street prostitutes. Guess what Venkatesh is studying these days. I'm interested in quitting for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it's hard for me to do it. But I also think it's just really, really hard the older you get, especially when you start identifying yourself with a job. All right. So you actually looked in a fairly systematic empirical way at baseball players. So I actually never thought I would be interested in looking at baseball from the standpoint of a job. And one of my students, Justin Humphries, used to play baseball for the

Houston Astros organization. And he was in my class. So as I was sitting there in this classroom, I started thinking about all the issues that I had seen in independent baseball and affiliated baseball. Guys living check to check, struggling with whether they should go back to school, family life, issues at home. And I thought if I could use some of the things that we were learning in class, talk to some of these guys and find out whether the stories and things that I was seeing and hearing would be reflected in the numbers. We followed a sample of the draft class of 2001. And so that's about, you know, it's 10 years. And so we thought that would help us to understand what happens to these folks. Now, this doesn't include the immigrants because they came into the country and they

didn't go through the draft to play ball. These are just the people who were out of high school or who were in college and they were drafted by a major league team. I think one of the most curious things that we find is how much 10 years matter. So if you take two people who grew up in the same circumstances, let's say one played baseball and one didn't, the person who plays baseball is making about 40 percent less on average 10 years after they enter the game than the person who decides not to play baseball and who just wanted a regular career. All right. So what kind of background is typical for these American-born players that you're tracking? of the game than the person who decides not to play baseball and who just wanted a regular career. All right.

So what kind of background is typical for these American-born players that you're tracking? The average player probably looks like an upper middle class kid who comes out of college or comes out of high school. And when you follow an upper middle class kid for about seven to ten years, they're probably going to make higher than the median average income. They're probably going to live in a neighborhood that's relatively safe. They're going to have a career. Now, when you take the counterpart among the pool that was drafted, that median kid, that kid looks like he's making about $20,000 to $24,000 a year, which is not a lot of money.

He's working probably five to seven months playing baseball and then struggling to find part-time work in the offseason. Might be coaching, might be doing some training, might be working on a construction site, might be working in fast food. So, Siddhir, you went down to Camden not long ago, right, to talk to some of these ballplayers? Yep. Now, Camden, I believe, is in the Atlantic League,

which is an independent league, meaning there's no direct path to a big league team. A lot of guys on a team like this, they've already been through the minor leagues and either topped out in talent or aged out, right? Most of the guys in the Camden River Sharks are probably in their late 20s. And so they've actually had careers in the minor league system and it didn't happen for them. And so they come into the Atlantic League thinking that they're still going to be able to make it. You sort of want to be able to tell them, hey, do you know that it's really unlikely that you're going to make it? And the fact is that we learned that very few people, if any, around them are telling them this.

So they're not really prepared to talk about it except except some. Particularly this guy, Noah Hall, was a really, really interesting person because he actually was thinking that this may be the end. It's probably not happening. It's probably not happening, but I'm still going to prepare and everything the same way I would regardless, because you never know. You still never know. In the way back of the mind, it's still there. I know. I feel like, trust me, I feel like sometimes, hey, if I have a good start to this year, whatever happens, you never know.

I could get picked up, and if I went off wherever I went, it could happen. Noah is 34, and Noah has been playing 16 seasons, including this one. When you look at him, you probably don't think that he is a baseball player. He looks like a running back. This is a guy who really looks like he's never, ever going to stop playing. Some guys just see the writing on the wall, and I just try to ignore the writing on the wall. You know, that's where, I don't know, I just,

I don't want to look back and say that I. You know, that's where, I don't know. I just, I don't want to look back and say that I didn't give it everything I could. And, you know, and I think I could still play another five, 10 years, I think. So Noah's from Northern California and he was raised by his mom, a nurse. And Noah has a wife, Kelly, and they have a lovely son, Isaiah. And Kelly and Isaiah follow Noah around to whatever team he ends up playing for that season. And let me tell you, he's played for a lot of teams over the years. After Noah's practice, I had a chance to go out to dinner with the Hall family and get to know them a little bit. I'm the one who's there like when he gets out and he has

a good game or when he has a bad game. Like I'm the one who I go through that kind of emotional roller coaster with him. So one of the one who, I go through that kind of emotional rollercoaster with him. So one of the strange things we found out when we spoke to baseball players is that they have their own language for quitting. They actually quit. They just don't call it that. They don't call it quitting.

They don't call it giving up. But they say, you know what? I'm just going to shut it down for a while. Okay, so what does it mean to be a quitter as opposed to I'm a shutter downer? Same thing. It just sounds better. I'm just shutting it down.

You're not really doing it, but you are. Have you ever wanted to tell them, but you had to hold yourself back? To shut it down? All the time. Oh yeah. All the time. Especially in the last couple of years. Yeah, especially in the last couple of years.

We've actually fought over it because it is. It's so hard. I understand his – like being his wife and trying to be supportive, I understand that it's got to be really hard because I do know how much he loves the game. Well, that's particularly poignant in my view because baseball is one of those rare sports that because it doesn't have a clock, no game is ever out of reach. I mean you could be behind 1,000 runs in the bottom of the ninth, and theoretically you can still come back and win. So that's part of the ethic of baseball is never, never, never quit. Quitting is not an option.

Yeah, quitting is usually not an option. But, you know, Justin is trying to make it easier for the players to quit and to make that transition. He's been working on building an organization that could help baseball players to get out of baseball when the time is right and to join that world that the rest of us live in. Well, when you're 25 playing an independent ball, making less than $2,000 a month, living off your parents because you can't financially sustain yourself like that. At some point you have to say, look, I've got – with no degree. I had less than an associate's degree at that point. So at some point you have to tell yourself, I can't do this to myself.

I can't do this to my parents. And I can't continue when I know there's untapped potential to do other things. So Justin Humphries stared right into the dark heart of his sunk costs, all those years he spent pursuing his dream. And then he made the big quip. We'll hear more from Sudhir Venkatesh later in the show. In a moment, we'll tell you what my Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dovner. So for ballplayers like Justin Humphries and Noah Hall, quitting their athletic dream is a long, painful process. Steve Levitt, he's my Freakonomics friend and co-author, an economist at the University of Chicago, he advocates quitting fast. I try to talk my grad students into quitting all the time.

Quitting grad school? Quitting grad school, yeah. A lot of people, you make choices without a lot of information, and then you get new information. And quitting is often the right thing to do. I try to talk my kids into quitting soccer or baseball if they're not good at it. I mean, I've never had any shame in quitting. I quit economic theory, quit macroeconomics. I pretty much quit everything that I'm bad at. You do have this mantra, fail fast. Fail quickly, yeah, exactly. So if I were to say one of the single most important explanations for how I managed to succeed against all odds in the field of economics, it was by being a quitter.

That ever since the beginning, my mantra has been fail quickly. If I started with 100 ideas, I'm lucky if two or three of those ideas will ever turn into academic papers. One of my great skills as an economist has been to recognize the need to fail quickly and the willingness to jettison a project as soon as I realize that it's likely to fail. Getting talked into quitting grad school by your 155-pound professor is one thing.

How about a Navy SEAL instructor? So Hell Week is considered to be the hardest week of the hardest military training in the world. That's Eric Greitens. He got a PhD in politics from Oxford and then joined the Navy SEALs. He fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. He's now written a book called The Heart and the Fist, The Education of a Humanitarian, The Making of a Navy SEAL. Here's how Greitens remembers Hell Week. It is a week of continuous military training during

which most classes sleep for a total of two to five hours over the course of the entire week. During Hell Week, they have you running for miles in soft sand on the beach, doing two-mile ocean swims, running the obstacle course. They put you in small teams and ask you to land small rubber boats on jagged rocks in the middle of the night. There are all of these tests which are designed to push people to their physical, mental, and emotional limits. Hell Week is a useful way for the Navy to determine who's fit to be a SEAL, the kind of person you'd want to send to get Osama bin Laden. Greitens says the instructors hover over you, taunting you, practically begging you to quit. And the vast majority would quit before it was over.

That's the point. You'd hear the instructors come out on their bullhorns and they'd say, That's right, gentlemen. This is only the beginning of the second night. And what they did then was the instructors took us out and they lined us up on the beach and they had us watch as the sun was setting. And as the sun was setting, the instructors started to get inside people's minds and they'd say, Tonight's going to be the hardest and the coldest and the toughest night of your lives. And they'd come over the bull horns and they'd say,

The week just gets colder and harder and worse and you're only at the beginning. And they really started to get inside people's minds. And I can remember the instructor saying at one point, and if anybody quits right now, we'll give you a hot coffee and donuts. Right, and everybody was freezing. So they set up this little incentive over there. If you want to go over and ring the bell, you can quit, and they'll give you a hot coffee and donuts.

And the whole idea is that the instructors really encourage, they want everyone to succeed. But if people are going to quit, they want to encourage them to quit. When you quit by the bell, you ring it three times. This tells everyone in earshot that you're done. Grayton says there are two kinds of quitters, the ones who make excuses and the ones who are honest with themselves. I don't think many people want to say to themselves that they quit at the same time. We've all failed in our lives.

We've all failed at different things in different ways and I think there's a lot to be said for facing that failure squarely. And the people who I know who were able to admit, you know, it wasn't the right thing for me at that time. And I went over and I decided to quit. I decided to ring the bell. They're really able to move on from their experience. And I do find that, you know, there's only shame in it if you feel shame. So what would you say if I told you there's evidence that quitting is good for you? Physiologically and psychologically good for you? People who are better able to let go when they experience unattainable goals. They experience, for example, less depressive symptoms, less negative affect over time. They also have lower cortisol levels, and they have lower levels of systemic inflammation,

which is a marker of immune functioning, and they develop fewer physical health problems over time. That's Karsten Rausch, no relation to Robert Reich. Rasch is a psychology professor at Concordia University in Montreal. In a study of 90 adolescents, he and a colleague found that being able to abandon goals that are essentially unattainable is good for your health. Now, you have to ask yourself, what's unattainable and what's not? When Justin Humphries was 18 years old, the major leagues seemed pretty attainable. By 25, not so much.

If I were put through hell week, unattainable. According to Roche, each of us encounters an unattainable goal about once a year. Unfortunately, nobody's walking around with a big neon sign urging us to quit. So, this is a puzzle, and How is a person to know when he or she, under which circumstances he or she should quit or disengage? Yeah, that's, I would say, the $1 million question. When to struggle and when to quit. And I don't think that there is a general answer to this question. However, people can make two different mistakes in the regulation

of their life. They can quit too early when they should have persisted, or they can quit too late. Okay. No offense, Professor Rausch, but it's not very helpful. Sometimes you quit too early when you should have persisted, and sometimes you persist too long when you should have quit? Really? That's all you've got? Really? That's all he's got. Which shows, if nothing else, what a true dilemma this is, to quit or not to quit. Let me ask you this. Are you much of a quitter? Oh, I am bad at quitting. I really have a difficult time. I try to persist as much as possible. Maybe that's why this phenomenon is so interesting to me. Well, maybe I can help you. Why don't you tell me something that you're involved in that you think is a goal that may be unattainable,

and I'll try to talk into quitting. Well, at this point, I can't think about something that is unattainable right now. But these things, they pop up over time. Do you smoke? Do you smoke by chance? Yeah, actually, I'm a smoker. Do you want to quit smoking? Well, yeah, on some level.

But on a different level, I enjoy it very much. This conversation went on for a while. I'll spare you the details. Let me just say this. Either I am incredibly unpersuasive or Karsten Rasch really, really doesn't want to quit smoking. Maybe both. He says he wants to quit, but he really doesn't want to quit smoking. Maybe both.

He says he wants to quit, but he really doesn't sound like it. It's like a bad O. Henry story. The professor of quitting who can't quit smoking. You can empathize, can't you? I can empathize. There's something you really want to quit. You know you'll be healthier for it, but you can't. You try and you try and you try, but you just can't. Until one day, finally, you wake up and you have this vision of what your life would be like without that thing in it. And it's not so terrible. That's how my first quit happened

yep that's my old band we were called the right profile started in college down in north carolina there were four of us we were pretty bad at first but but we took it seriously, kept at it. And that's how I sound when I sing. We worked hard at it because it was incredibly fun, but also because it was our dream. I mean, come on, who doesn't dream at some point of being a rock star? All right, so John, when you hear that song, which you didn't play on this recording, but you played this song, I don't know, how many times do you think you ended up playing this song in your life? God, probably

I feel like I've played it at least 50 times. That's John Worcester. We called him Chester, but his actual name is John. He was our drummer. Awesome drummer. You might know his name. He went on to play with Superchunk for years. He still plays with them and with the Mountain Goats, too.

The other guys in the band were Jeff Foster and Tim Fleming. We played all over the place. We made demo tapes. We released a single. And we got a management team in New York City, the same guys who managed the Replacements and the Del Fuegos, which were bands that we loved. And the managers brought us up to New York to play for the major record labels. Two months later, I remember playing,

going up to CBGB's in New York to play their showcase show for some labels, one of which was Arista. And I remember just in this total dive, CBGB's, there was a table, and on the table was just a card that said, reserved for Clive Davis. Do you remember going up to their office on that trip? And do you remember when he put Aretha on the phone briefly to tell us to sign with Arista? Yes.

And I remember when everybody kind of walked away, we would go and look through people's Rolodexes to find the personal numbers of Carly Simon and somebody else. I just remember like we never used them. We just thought that was hilarious just to like thumb through this Rolodex and find her number. So it's true. Clive Davis, the music industry giant, signed us to Arista Records. It was incredibly exciting, but also weird. We were this little indie, half-punky, half-country band, used to doing things the way we did them, and now we moved to New York. It was hard. Maybe we were just a bad fit with Arista.

They wanted pop hits, and we didn't seem to have them. And the other thing is, I wasn't really sure I wanted to be a rock star anymore. As bands go, we were pretty straight-laced. No drugs, not much drinking. But the whole lifestyle, especially as we got a little bit more successful and started hanging around with bigger bands, it became less attractive to me. The idea of wanting to be famous, which seemed really fun at first, began to feel unsavory, unhealthy. For six years, this was all I wanted. But one night, I was sitting in my hotel

room in Memphis working on some lyrics in my notebook, and I found myself writing the words, What do I want? I thought about it. I didn't really know anymore. And then I wrote, Not this. A couple weeks later, I quit the band. We were playing some songs, and we could just tell you weren't – you were kind of moody and maybe something was wrong.

But we knew what was wrong. We knew that this might be where it parts soon. I think we just kind of felt that. And we played something and I remember Jeff saying to you, like, what's wrong or what's your problem? And I don't know exactly what you said, but I remember something to the effect of, I don't know if I want to do this anymore. The hardest part was that being in the band wasn't just what I did. It was what I was. Like Justin Humphries and the other ballplayers, baseball isn't just a thing you do. It's your identity.

I'll be honest with you. It was tough. I grieved. I mourned. And you, it was tough. I grieved, I mourned, and I had to start over as a writer. At that point, I didn't know much about economics. I'd never heard of the sunk cost fallacy. But by quitting something I'd put years of work into, that's what I was fighting against. One of the most common examples is the Vietnam War, because it was often said that we've invested too much to quit. Well, it's not a good idea to continue to invest if you feel it's a losing course of action.

That's Hal Arcus. He's a psychology professor at Ohio State University. A sunk cost is just what it sounds like, time or money that you've already spent. The sunk cost fallacy is when you tell yourself that you can't quit something because of all that time or money that you already spent. We shouldn't fall for this fallacy, but we do it all the time. Arcus and a colleague learned something that makes falling for the sunk cost fallacy even more embarrassing. It turns out that children don't fall for it, or even animals. Your dog's not going to have any rules like,

oh, I spent a lot of time at that location waiting for him to feed me, and wouldn't want to waste all that time, so I'll go back there and wait, even though it wasn't very successful. Now humans have these other things that get in the way. What gets in the way? Apparently, we take a rule we learned growing up to not be wasteful, and we over-apply it. Well, there's that chance that what we're working on actually can be rescued, can be resuscitated, making the distinction and trying to decide whether this is a truly lost cause

or not. I recognize it's a difficult decision sometimes because it's not one of these things where it's clearly one or the other. But after enough negative feedback, it should be more clear then. I guess with my band, I'd finally had enough negative feedback to quit.

I'll tell you the truth, some of the feedback I still miss. It was insanely fun, and a part of me still wishes I'd stuck it out, at least to finish that first record with Arista. But the bottom line? I'm so glad I quit. For me, it was the right move. Much as I miss music sometimes, the upside of quitting for me meant that I got to lead a life more

like the one that I envisioned. Coming up, remember Allie, the high-end escort from the start of the show? Well, she's back and quitting again. From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner. You remember Allie, the Texas woman who quit computer programming to become a high-end escort? Sure you do. At her peak, she was earning about $300,000 a year. Now, Allie, are you still working as an escort?

No, I decided to get out of the escort business. You know, it was wonderful to me. I enjoyed it. I made a lot of money, but I don't regret quitting either. Again, you know, you talk about opportunity cost. And when I went into the escort business, I wasn't dating anybody. I just really want to enjoy life and be free. And that's what I did. But, you know, I met somebody and, and we decided together that, you know, that we wanted a lifestyle that didn't include prostitution. So I let it go. And besides enjoying life and traveling and spending time with your companion,

what else have you been doing? Well, I went to school and studied economics. But, you know, mostly I'm enjoying life, you know. All right, so I realize that Allie isn't your typical prostitute. I mean, first of all, she made a lot of money. And on top of that, she went back to school to study economics. So she really gets opportunity cost. So much so that when the time was right, she quit being a prostitute. Sudhir Venkatesh, the sociologist who talked to fading baseball

players for us, he's also been asking prostitutes about quitting. But first, I asked him about something that he recently quit. I quit an administrative job that I had at my university for a couple of years, and I probably should have quit after a couple of days. Why'd you quit, finally? Well, I think I quit because I realized that I was no good at the job. Luckily, I have a job as a professor, and so I'm not in the ranks of the unemployed like so many people who sometimes quit jobs that they don't like. So I'm back to doing research, which I love.

You heard me talking to Allie, who kind of falls into that rare category. She's someone who did very, very well and decided to, if not cash out necessarily, to stop. But I understand you talked to some people, sex workers, one named Maxine, I believe, who doesn't see that as the way to go. So talk to me a little bit about Maxine and her attitude toward quitting. I should say that we're not using the real names of the women that we interviewed here, but Maxine, as we're calling her, is a really curious person because she really goes against a lot of the stereotypes that we have about women in sex work. She's been working as a sex worker for 22 years. She laughs as she says, you know, I don't know if I'm ever going to quit. Yeah, no, I never think about retiring, I know many workers who are in their 50s, 60s. I met one in her early 70s who is still working. And in our current society with the tearing down of our infrastructures and our

social security nets, all of us are going to be working for a long time. All right, Sudhir. So there are those prostitutes who do quit. And I just wonder, you know, how does that happen? How do you – if you want to go from sex work into the legitimate labor market, how do you go about, for instance, three years, five years, and you have to account for that time. You have to account for what you've done. Crystal Dubois is the co-director of the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Center in New York City. And actually, one of the services the center provides that Crystal helps sex workers with is getting their resumes ready. So it becomes a creative endeavor. So we dig deep and I say, what have you done? Somebody might say, well, I used to wash cars with my uncle on the weekends. They'll say, oh, no, that wasn't a job. That was just a thing that I did. And I was like, no, we're going to make this sound like it works. You know, that it's a job.

It was a job. You were working. You were showing up. You were doing a good job. And nine times out of ten, the person says, oh, that's lying and I can't do that. And I have to orient them to saying, look, everybody is beefing up their resume. So dealing with the resume is one thing. But when you leave sex work, you also face this issue about taking a huge pay cut.

They will probably never make that kind of money again. We spoke to someone, Maya, who is a former prostitute, who now works as a booker, as a manager. She schedules and screens appointments for other sex workers in Tucson, Arizona. A lot of women find themselves going back to sex work when they don't really want to, myself included. Even booking, I don't really want to book anymore. But it's very, very hard to go from making $300 an hour to making $25 an hour, which would be decent pay in the real world. So, Sudhir, you've talked to baseball players who were reluctant to quit, even though they're not going to make the major leagues. You've talked to sex workers, some of whom are reluctant to quit, but some of whom do a really, really good job of it. For those who do a good job,

talk to me about how they prepare for it and maybe how what they do we could all learn from a little bit. The first is that you got to pull that bandaid off and do it quickly. And the ones that are really successful in leaving a trade in which they thought that they were going to be doing for a long time or that they had prepared for, put a lot of hours in, when they make that decision quickly, they do pretty well. I think this idea of not looking back, I know it's a clichéd expression. But so many of the people that are able to move on just go forward. And the next time I take a job, I'm going to see if the second day I shouldn't be figuring out how to get the heck out of there. I'm sure some of you, as you listen to people talk about quitting prostitution, your mind jumps the timeline and you go back and stop these women from becoming prostitutes in the first place. It's like watching a horror movie where

you're saying, no, no, no, don't open the door. But these women did open that door. There are, however, some places that try to get people to quit before they've even started. We sent Stacey Vannick-Smith, a reporter for Marketplace, to get the details. How much do you like your job? If somebody offered you money to quit, how much would it take for you to do it? This job is worth more than a million, definitely. It's just I love it here. It's very hard to get in, but once you're in, it's just kind of like the Wizard of Oz.

We're in the Emerald City. That's what I feel like. That's Christina Gomez. And would you believe she's talking about a job that pays just a few bucks above minimum wage? The job is at Zappos, an online shoe store that Amazon paid almost a billion dollars for in 2009. At an employee training session in Las Vegas, everybody talked like that. Most of the 35 people in my session were headed to the company's call center,

where they'll earn about $11 an hour dealing with customer questions and complaints. But as it trains these new hires, Zappos also throws them a curveball. Here's Marcela Gutierrez, a trainer with Zappos. Remember how we said that we want this to be more than a job for you guys. We want it to be a career. We want it to be a calling for everybody.

I'm here to offer you $3,000 if you decide that this is not the right place for you. It's known around Zappos as the offer. During training, when these new employees are already being paid, Zappos offers $3,000 to any new hire who wants to walk away from the job. It's been going on for a few years and it's gotten some press, but secret or no, what is the company thinking? I put that question to company CEO Tony Hsieh, who masterminded the offer. It's really putting the employee in the position of, do you care more about money or do you care more about this culture in the company? And if they care more about the easy money, then we probably aren't the right fit for them.

Zappos talks about its culture a lot. And Shea says that culture is enough to keep people from taking an offer anywhere else or Zappos' offer to leave. And when I say culture, I am not just talking about free soda in the break room and casual Fridays, as I discovered on the company tour with Zappos supervisor Lauren Becker. So we've entered the main building. We can like officially kick off our real tour. Everybody's wearing sneakers and t-shirts. There are sign-up sheets for picnics and poker groups. Conference rooms are decorated in outer space and under the sea themes. It looks like like the convergence of like seven different holidays. It definitely does.

You'll see that everybody's desk is decorated different. Their knickknacks are rubber duckies, streamers. It's pretty crazy. People are so excited to join the crazy, they turn down the free money. Out of the nearly 2,000 people Zappos has trained, the company says only about 30 have ever taken the offer. Christina Gomez is one of those people. Remember her? It's kind of like the Wizard of Oz. We're in the Emerald City. That's what I feel like.

Turns out, a week after I talked with her, Gomez took the offer. I called her up to ask her what pulled the curtain back. It was very cold. It was a honeymoon, you know, I started getting comfortable with Zappos. And then I started seeing maybe some of the things that I didn't really like about it. And so we broke up. Gomez says the offer wasn't the main reason she quit. She says the schedule Zappos gave her didn't work with her child care and another job she has at Apple. But how big of an incentive is the offer? $3,000 equals two months of busting

your hump in a call center. The fact almost no one takes it just doesn't make sense. It does, however, make sense to Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke who studies decision making. He says that easy money is actually not so easy. The reason that this trick works is that people spend 10 days, they become a part of the family. Zappos is all about making trainees feel like family. There are happy hours and scavenger hunts and team projects. And after all that, and before you've actually started working, you get the offer.

It's a limited time thing. And when it expires, that's when its real power kicks in, says Ariely. There's something called cognitive dissonance that says that if you've acted in a certain way, over time you're going to overly justify your behavior. So the next morning after you rejected the $3,000, you're going to wake up and say, my goodness, I really must love this company if I rejected this amount. Translation, we like suffering for things we love. We like it so much that if we suffer for something, we will actually decide we must love it.

Ariely says fraternities and sororities work like this when they make rushers stand in the rain or run naked across campus, turning indignity into allegiance. agents. Militaries, sports teams, religious cults all use this tactic too, combining our intense desire to belong with our intense desire to justify our actions. The result? A group of employees who won't even quit if you pay them. That's Marketplace reporter Stacey Vanek-Smith. Zappos does sound a bit like a religion, and quitting a religion is never simple. My parents were a pair of Brooklyn-born Jews who, before they met each other, both converted to Roman Catholicism. This was in the mid-1940s. My parents were in their 20s. As you can imagine, this conversion didn't go over so well with their families. My dad's father declared him dead,

sat Shiva for him, never spoke to my father again. So I grew up in a very devout Catholic family, the eighth and youngest kid. And then when I was in my 20s, I quit Catholicism, went back to Judaism. My mother took it hard, but not nearly as hard as my dad's father took it when he converted. Anyway, I've always been pretty interested in religious quits. My name is Saloma Miller Furlong. I am the author of a new memoir called Why I Left the Amish. I am Emma Ginrich, and I go to college at Tarleton State University in Stephenville, Texas. And right now I'm also working on finishing up my book and getting it published. And what is your book called, Emma? Runaway Amish Girl.

I wanted to speak to Emma Gingrich and Saloma Furlong because quitting a religion like the Amish seems especially traumatic with the religion, family, and community all mixed up. When you look back at the decision you made, which was a big one, to quit your religious lifestyle and religious community, talk to me about the price that you feel you paid or the benefit that you gained? When I think of costs, I think of the things I miss. And definitely the community atmosphere of knowing your place in the community is part of the costs. You know, the church gatherings where they sing the Amish chants, and feeling like there's a sense of legacy almost in that. Strong, precious, never-ending. But the upside of it is, there have been so many times, so many moments in my life when I knew that quitting the Amish was the right thing to do. One example was on May 29th of 1982 when I walked into the church

sanctuary at Christ Church Presbyterian on the Redstone campus and saw my husband-to-be standing there in a blue tuxedo waiting for me to come up to the altar. That moment encapsulated just how I was doing the right thing. That was literally the happiest day of my life. So Emma, if you could just describe as briefly as you want, kind of your childhood, your family growing up and then getting to the point where you decided to leave and why and how that happened. My family used to make baskets and we would take them every Friday and sell them at a little town close to a busy highway. And sometimes it would be me and my sister. We did a lot of things that we weren't supposed to do, but

that was around 15 was the time when I started thinking about how it would be if I would leave the Amish. And, you know, sitting there selling baskets, you see a lot of people coming, and we used to look at cars and look at all the different colors and try to pick which one we would want if we would ever leave the Amish. Did it feel like you became a different person? Are you the same person who just needed a change of scenery? I guess what I really want to know is what was the cost to you of quitting the Amish? What were the downsides and what were the upsides?

Well, the downsides would be leaving the family and knowing that nothing's going to be the same again when you go back home to visit. And the upside is, yes, you are a different person. You become, to me, I became somebody else, which was good for me. How old are you now? 23. And do you have regrets about leaving? No. Zero? Not at all.

Saloma Furlong is in her 50s. She now lives in Massachusetts. Not long ago, she did an informal survey of the Amish community where she grew up in Geauga County, Ohio. Out of about 2,500 households, she estimates that some 170 individuals left the community. So quitting isn't common, but it's not like it never happens either. Furlong says that her father was mentally ill and violent, and that ultimately is what led her to leave. My life was so unbearable that the fear of the known was greater than my fear of the unknown. So for me, it's a matter of, are you happy the way you are? And if not, then quit what you're doing. It's that simple for me. You make it sound so easy.

I'm wondering, have you quit other things in life besides the Amish? Oh, yes. Do you want me to get started? Yes, please. I've quit jobs that were not satisfactory. I quit my bakery business when I realized after 10 years of punching bread dough that it was never going to talk back to me and it was intellectually a desert. Let's see, what else have I quit? I quit a church community one time. So yes, I'm a serial quitter, and it's worked for me.

What can I say? You're a gold medal quitter. You're not just a serial quitter. You're a champion. But let me ask you this. In retrospect, were all of these quits good? Yes. They were. All right, so you really need to be like were all of these quits good? Yes. They were. All right. So you really need to be like a quitting coach, don't you? You need to travel around the world and tell people, look at this situation. Why are you still in this?

Why are you stuck in this? Do you think that's a future calling of yours perhaps? Somebody just asked me that the other day about being a counselor. And I said, nope, it's not something I want to do. Because you just quit anyway. You might be right. A quitter never wins and a winner never quits. In 1937, a self-help pundit named Napoleon Hill included that phrase in his very popular book, Think and Grow Rich. Hill was inspired in part by the rags-to-riches industrialist Andrew Carnegie. These days, the phrase is often attributed to Vince Lombardi, the legendarily tough football coach. What a lineage.

And it does make sense, doesn't it? Of course it takes tremendous amounts of time and effort and, for lack of a more scientific word, stick-to-itiveness to make any real progress in the world. But time and effort and even stick-to-itiveness are not in infinite supply. Remember the opportunity cost. Every hour, every ounce of effort you spend here cannot be spent there. So let me counter Napoleon Hill's phrase with another one, certainly not as well-known, something that Stella Adler, the great acting coach, used to say. Your choice is your talent. So choosing the right path, the right project,

the right job or passion or religion, that's where the treasure lies. That's where the value lies. So if you realize that you've made a wrong choice, even if you've already sunk way too much cost into it, well, I've got just one word to say to you, my friend. Quit. too much cost into it? Well, I've got just one word to say to you, my friend. Quit! You say laughter and I say laughter. You say after and I say after. Laughter, laughter,

after, after. Let's call the whole thing off. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, APM American Public Media, After, after, let's call the whole thing off. Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. Our show is produced by Chris Neary with help from Diana Wynn, Susie Lechtenberg, Ellen Horn, and Peter Clowney. Colin Campbell is our executive producer. This episode was mixed by Dylan Keefe with help from Michael Rayfield. Special thanks to Sudhir Venkatesh,

Justin Humphries, and Donald Craybill. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast at iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more. and counselors but we know we need each other so we better call the calling off let's call the whole thing off