Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - The Upside of Quitting with Stephen Dubner

Episode Date: March 3, 2020

"Winners never quit and quitters never win.” Is it possible quitting is actually underrated? Stephen Dubner, co-author of the bestselling "Freakonomics" books, makes the case for re-examining how we think about quitting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With The Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. If you've ever listened to Freakonomics Radio, then you're probably familiar with the voice of Stephen Dubner. A journalist by training, he's one half of the team that introduced Freakonomics to the world. One of the things I've always enjoyed about talking with Stephen Dubner is he's incredibly curious about the world around him. He's also not afraid to poke holes in ideas that are just taken for granted, like quitting, for example.

There are all kinds of quotations from famous people, legendary football coach Vince Lombardi, just to name one, about the downside of quitting. But as Dubner told me a few years ago, there's a good case to be made for approaching this idea in a different way. So Lombardi was famous, a winner never quits, a quitter never wins. Churchill famous for, I believe the quote was, never, never, never, never, never, never give up. And then he went on to say in matters large and small and so on. And you know what? If you're Winston Churchill and you are the prime minister of a great nation that is literally facing extinction at the hands of the German Nazi government, then I would say, yeah, not giving up is the way to go. But most of us, the stakes aren't so high. Most of us are in situations

routinely, whether it's a job or a career or a startup or a project or a relationship or whatever it is, where we're afraid to quit because we've been told that quitting is bad and we are failures for doing so. And so we make the argument that if you want to think like a freak, you should see the upside of quitting. What is the upside of quitting? The biggest one is that every time you do something, there's something else you can't do. It's known as opportunity cost. So for every dollar or hour or brain cell I spend on something, that's an hour or dollar or brain cell I can't spend on something else. And so the upside of quitting can be real. But I appreciate that's not necessarily the sensible or an easy thing for a lot of people to do.

You can read more from Stephen Dubner and his co-author, Stephen Levitt, by picking up a copy of their bestselling book, Think Like a Freak. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.