The Tim Ferriss Show - #254: When to Quit - Lessons from World-Class Entrepreneurs, Investors, Authors, and More

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Starting point is 00:03:39 Instead, it shares the tips and tricks of multiple people on one topic. So you can consider this the first ever roundtable conversation on this podcast. Now I'd love your feedback. So please let me know on Twitter at T Ferris, T F E R R I S S what you think of this zero to 10. How much do you like it? What would you change, et cetera. And here's how it came about. Some time ago, I prompted subscribers to my five bullet Friday newsletter, which is free. Every Friday, I send out a very short email with five bullets of things that I am reading or that I've discovered experimenting with, et cetera. Could include supplements, articles, books, who knows? I find a lot of weird stuff that I end up enjoying. And if you want to check that out, you can sign up. It's always free. It is just tim.blog forward slash Friday. So check it out, tim.blog forward

Starting point is 00:04:30 slash Friday. And I solicited questions. These were upvoted. And one of the most upvoted questions was one that I struggled with. And this is from JF Kearns. Here's the question. Where's the line between stubbornly pursuing an idea which isn't working and the patience and persistence needed to actually make it work? In other words, when should you give up versus when should you push on? And I thought about how I would answer this and I realized I actually struggle with this. So rather than make up some bullshit and just play that off and give my own response, why don't I reach out to a number of people I think would have better answers to this? And that's exactly what I did. So I took that question and I sent it to a number of friends of mine and past guests on the podcast and they dug into it. So when should you quit? When should you persist? When do you know if an idea or how do you know if an idea is a bad idea that just isn't going to work versus a good idea that you haven't made work yet? So the first person we're going to start

Starting point is 00:05:36 off with is Scott Belsky. He is an investor and entrepreneur best known perhaps for co-creating Behance, an online portfolio platform. In 2010, Belsky was included in Fast Company's 100 Most Creative People in Business list. Then you'll learn from 17 time, I think it is, bestselling author Seth Godin. And then we have hedge fund manager, author, entrepreneur, James Altsher, Debbie Millman, whose episode on this podcast is still one of the most downloaded of all time. Adam Robinson, the co-founder of the Princeton Review and advisor to some of the masters of the universe out there. And then we have incredible photographer and also CEO Chase Jarvis and many more.

Starting point is 00:06:17 So I am excited about this. I hope you enjoy it. Let me know what you think of this format at T Ferris on Twitter. One quick house cleaning point. This is very, very important for any of you who receive five bullet Friday or subscribe to any of my email. Here it is. I clean my email list every six months so that email service providers know I am only emailing people who really want what I am sending because you got to remember it's not the size of the list that counts. It's how you use it. So if you subscribe to any of my email and you want to keep receiving them, please open a recent message for me and click on any of the links within. It doesn't matter which. I'm going to be doing a big purge soon, getting rid of people who have been getting a lot of

Starting point is 00:06:57 emails and not opening any of them because it's just crowding up your inbox and it's a waste of everyone's time. So I'll be doing a bitch purge. that's not what i was going to say i'll be doing a big purge soon getting rid of people who are not opening email and removing folks from the list so if you are interested in still getting those please just open one of my email doesn't really matter a recent one and click on any link and that will keep you subscribed and if you're interested in checking out what more than, I suppose at this point, around a million people get every Friday, check out 5 Bullet Friday at tim.blog forward slash Friday. Okay, back to the episode. This one covers a wide

Starting point is 00:07:36 range of stories and lessons and will ultimately, I hope, help you determine when to keep pushing forward and separate that from when it is wise to quit. And I did this one for myself as well. So enjoy. Hey, Tim, it's Scott Belsky, entrepreneur and investor, responding to your question about when to keep going and when to call it quits. I've been thinking about it. There are many times in the middle of any bold journey where the ambiguity and the self-doubt, endless iteration, get you down and really make you question everything. It's especially hard before you have any customers, before anyone even knows what you're building. I always like to say that anonymity is both a blessing and a bitch.

Starting point is 00:08:21 It's a blessing in that you can play and iterate as if nobody is watching. It is a bitch because nobody is watching because nobody cares. Every journey is like this to some extent, so you can't quit because of it. Hardship means you may be doing something special and creating something defensible from competitors and copycats.

Starting point is 00:08:39 The question, I think, is whether or not the difficulties are making you question your core assumptions and belief in the final vision, or if they're just getting you down. I guess the trick is to separate the hardship in tough times from what you're learning. If you're learning that your assumptions were wrong, that customers don't want your product, and that you're potentially building something in the wrong space or just building the wrong thing, then you should ask yourself the classic question. Knowing all you know now, would you pursue this project all over again? Would you invest the money and energy you have invested to get as far as

Starting point is 00:09:17 you've come in solving this problem? Or knowing all you know now, would you just do something different? If you still believe in the vision and while impatient with progress and deflated by the process, you still have conviction, then don't quit. Keep on trucking. You are just having some of those mid-journey blues. Society's immune system is trying to squash you. Don't let it. Keep going.

Starting point is 00:09:42 But if your answer is hell no, if you think, geez, if I could go back before I got into this mess, there is no way I would head into this direction, then ask yourself, why are you still trying? Are the sunk costs keeping you from quitting? Are you overvaluing the plan you have only because of how much you've invested in it so far. I have heard the human tendency behind this is referred to as divestiture aversion or more simply the endowment effect. We have this tendency to disproportionately value things just because we own them, regardless of how we got them. And I think you're liable to believe more in your vision and hold on dearly to the progress you've made thus far because of all you've invested in it.

Starting point is 00:10:26 I find the winners never quit mantra to be very elementary because I think it goes against what we've learned from many successful startups that have pivoted from their original vision with great success in Twitter, Pinterest, and Airbnb, to name a few. If you've lost conviction but refuse to change because of past progress you've made or past investments from others or just investments from yourself, then you've become misaligned with your own vision. You're officially doing things for the wrong reason. So I guess to sum it up, if your conviction remains, if the vision is still something that gets you all giddy and teary-eyed, don't let the incremental obstacles and setbacks push you to quit.

Starting point is 00:11:08 Instead, use these periods to build muscle. I remember, and will never forget even if I want to, the bootstrapping years of Behance where I encountered this quite a bit. Being just a few months away from running out of money and having tons of fits and starts because honestly didn't have the right experience and expertise on our team to get it right the first time, we felt beaten down quite a bit. But the vision of organizing the creative world's work never got less interesting. Despite all these hardships, I don't think we ever lost conviction in what that might look like and getting excited about it. So we just got tired and despondent a lot while trying to achieve it. But we never really lost that conviction.

Starting point is 00:11:51 So we didn't quit. We just tried to learn how to become more resilient. When we were low on cash, we tried to become more resourceful. We had a saying on our team, we don't even want to hire new people, refactor, refactor, and then hire. And we became super fucking resourceful as a small team. And this definitely made us stronger. But always keep asking yourself, do I still believe in the vision here?

Starting point is 00:12:14 Would you embark on the same journey if you knew everything, you know, that you know now? If the answer is no, save yourself the struggle by making an inflection sooner or quitting and trying something entirely new. Don't just stick with it for the sake of it. Only put up and put in the hardship when you've got enough conviction. Hope that's helpful. Hey, it's Seth Godin, and I might be the only person you know who's written a bestselling book about quitting. It's called The Dip, and I want to explain it to

Starting point is 00:12:45 you now. There are two big ideas. The first one is this. Things that are scarce are more valuable, and creating something that's scarce is difficult, because if it was easy, it wouldn't be scarce. So what we have is a situation where lots of people start a project and then they hit the dip. The dip is the thing that makes that project worth doing in the first place. So for example, consider the case of doctors. To be a doctor, you've got to go to medical school and the dip in medical school is organic chemistry. Organic chemistry is designed to winnow out people who aren't going to make it the rest of the way. If it weren't for organic chemistry, there would be a lot more doctors.

Starting point is 00:13:33 And if there were a lot more doctors, being a doctor wouldn't be as valuable. Or consider the case of washboard abs. Many people aspire to have them, but they're difficult to get. So lots and lots of people join the gym in January to much glee and celebration, but by February, half of them have quit, and by March, half of the rest have quit. Why? Because it's hard, and the only people who get out at the other end have made it through the dip because they didn't quit. So the first lesson we take away from this is that it doesn't make sense to repeatedly start projects and quit them in the dip, because you're wasting an enormous amount of time. If we think about it from the point of

Starting point is 00:14:18 view of a company, somebody like Amazon worth $7 trillion or whatever it is today, how many of you were their customer the first week or the first month or the first year or even the first decade? That what happens is it's fun to start a company because you've got nothing but blue skies. And then it gets difficult. In the case of Amazon, it got difficult when the headlines were Amazon.toast and it was never going to work. But they persisted and they made it through the dip and came out on the other side. Their competitors didn't have the temerity and the stamina to make it to the other side. That's why it's so valuable to be Amazon.

Starting point is 00:14:59 Okay, so I said that was the first thing. What's the second thing? The second thing is that knowing the difference between a dip and a cul-de-sac or a dead end is critical because persistence alone doesn't guarantee success. That persistence is one of the requirements, but so is a smart strategy and generosity. So is doing something that might work. Too often, we find someone stuck in a cul-de-sac because they don't have the guts to stop. Because they're telling themselves the story that winners never quit and quitters never win,

Starting point is 00:15:38 which is baloney. Everybody who's a winner has also quit. You don't see many high-powered 50-year-old executives walking around in tutus. That's because they took ballet when they were four, but they quit. We don't do everything forever. We have to give up some of those things to get the energy and the resources we need to get through to the other side of the dip. So I think we can all agree

Starting point is 00:16:05 that cigarette smoking is a dead end, that it leads to emphysema and death. It makes sense to quit. There is no dip when it comes to cigarette smoking. But it may also be said of your freelance career, or it may also be said of this huge plan you have to change the world. And you've gotten those emails as much as I have, Tim. Those plans to change the world, like a thresher through a wheat field, like a hot knife through butter. If only, if only, if only, if only.

Starting point is 00:16:33 And the poor person is doing, has been doing it for seven, 10, 12 years because they think they're in a dip. They're not. It's a dead end. And how do you tell them apart? Well, I am afraid I cannot give you a map, but I hope I can give you a compass. How do you tell them apart? Well, I am afraid I cannot give you a map, but I hope I can give you a compass. How do we tell them apart? We tell them apart by first understanding that

Starting point is 00:16:53 someone else must have gone down this road before us. The chances that you will be the first person, the first human to get through this particular dip are very, very low. So it makes sense to put your resources into projects where others on similar projects have gone through a dip. If there's no one who has, then yes, go be a pioneer and I'm cheering for you, but it's a low profile way to move forward. The second thing is to ask yourself, do you have more assets than you had a week ago or a year ago? Is it adding up? Is there forward motion? So back to the Amazon example, every day, Amazon had more customers than the day before, every single day. That's forward motion. If, on the other hand, you're

Starting point is 00:17:45 living from paycheck to paycheck, from funding to funding, from short-term customer to short-term customer, and it's not adding up, then you might be in a dead end, not a dip. So to summarize, and the book's only 85 pages long. I hope you'll check it out. But to summarize the book, it's pretty simple. We know that Roger's adoption curve shows us there's a big, fat middle if you can get through the chasm. That chasm feels like a dip. That chasm feels like that moment when you should quit because that's when most people do quit. And the people who push through it get to the other side where they are the best in the world. They're being seen as being the best in the world, the best blogger, the best podcaster, the best online

Starting point is 00:18:26 store, the best eyeglass maker, the best tailor. Once you are seen as the best, you are rewarded by the search engines. You are rewarded by your customers. You are rewarded by the marketplace. But to get there, you must have the resources to make your way through the long and lonely dip. So if you're going to start, understand it's harder than you think. If you're going to start, commit to not quitting in the dip. And if you're going to start, practice understanding the difference

Starting point is 00:18:58 between a dip and a dead end. Thanks for letting me chime in, Tim. Hey, this is James Altucher. And you can find me or at least the cyborg part of me at jamesaltucher.com. And then there's links to me at Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and all sorts of other fun places. This is such a fascinating question, Tim, because it's not as if people should quit or it's not as if I have quit things that are going bad and stuck with things that are going good. There's really three types of situations and two things that can happen in each situation. So there are things that are going bad that you should stick with. There are things that are going bad that you should abandon.

Starting point is 00:19:48 There are things that are going neutral, which you should abandon. And there are things that are going good and even great, which you can either abandon or persist and step on the accelerator of. So, I'm going to give some examples. And actually, I'm going to start at the top. So I've been in several situations that were is Jerry Seinfeld. So GE, General Electric, offered Seinfeld a $100 million bonus if he would just do another season of Seinfeld at the end of his run. And he still said no. So Howard Stern asked him, how could you do that, Jerry? The entire country wanted you to do another season and you were offered $100 million. How could you say no to that?

Starting point is 00:20:53 And Jerry Seinfeld said, Howard, that's why those people are not writing the best show on television. And I am because I know exactly when to quit. Sometimes when things are going very well, every project in the world has a half-life. Every brand, every personality, the sales of every book or movie or business, everything at some point has a half-life where it starts to decline after that. And you could say, okay, well, I'm going to diversify revenue sources, or I'm going to find other things to do. But one thing is for sure is that when things are going great, often at the peak, when things are feel so good, you can't imagine how they can possibly go bad. That's the exact time you need to say, you know what, I need to diversify my life, or I need to stop this at the top and pursue

Starting point is 00:21:52 other creative or entrepreneurial pursuits, or I need to expand my life in other ways instead of continuing, you know, this thing that I've that I've built up and I feel so good about now is the time where I could be proud of what I've done and it's time to move on. So in my very first business that I sold, we were growing really fast. I was building websites for mostly entertainment companies. So we did the websites for just about every record label, Bad Boy Records, Loud Records, Interscope, Jive, and so on. We did HBO.com, Miramax.com, New Line, tons of movie websites, band websites, and so on. We were doing great.

Starting point is 00:22:35 We were growing 100% or 200% year over year, and yet I had this sense that I didn't really know what was going to happen in the next phase of the Internet. And we had I didn't know if I needed to build more software skills among my employees or more strategic skills among my employees. And I felt the ability to make websites was going to get commoditized. And we had such a great brand at that point. And everybody was making an offer to acquire us. My own partners felt, you know what, maybe we should keep on hitting the accelerator and grow as much as we can. But I felt, you know what, if they're learning how to build websites in junior high school, something's going wrong. And so we sold at the top of our game. And I'm glad we did because two years later or a year and a half later, the internet bust happened. And there was no way to predict that I could

Starting point is 00:23:34 have sold maybe at the very last minute, there was no way to predict. But sometimes you want to just sell or change gears at the top. When you've learned everything you feel you could have learned at that phase, when you've been through the steepest part of the learning curve and now the slope is very flat and it's very difficult to learn new things, you can either say, okay, well, I'm going to try really hard and pour all of my energy into getting incrementally better at something. Or I could be proud of what I did, start a new project at the bottom of a learning curve, and begin again. And so that's not always the best answer, but it's a perfectly valid answer to abandon something

Starting point is 00:24:18 that's doing great. Now, other times, you might say, well, we're continuing to grow, we're continuing to serve people. I have a very clear vision of what the future holds. I have so many ideas of what could happen next. Like with my own writing, for instance, I always have ideas of directions I want my writing to continue. So even though I might not always write in the same genre, I always just love writing. This is a personal passion I feel so that when I do it, I feel this nice feeling in my chest when I do it and I feel good about it. Doesn't matter the genre. Sometimes I switch that, but I always feel good and I always want to learn more and more about writing because I personally love it so much. And I feel it delivers value, not just to myself, but to an audience because everything you do has to have an audience. You can't think of just yourself. You have to determine also, am I delivering value for others? And you get feedback on that and other people will

Starting point is 00:25:23 tell you. So how does this apply, for instance, to the Seinfeld situation? Clearly he was getting feedback that his show was great and he was at the top of his game. He was super creative, but he had basically run out of ideas to continue his show about nothing. And he had that sense then he was hitting a wall that he had never experienced before. So he decided to abandon it. Whereas for me right now with something like writing, I can see 10 different directions it can go. I can picture the future a little bit about what directions I can go in for the next one, two, three years. So it's something I continue. Now the other thing, what about if something is only going okay? It's not bad

Starting point is 00:26:07 and it's not great. It feels like you should persist because it's going well. And let's say you're making money and you're feeling creative and people are noticing. When do you persist and when do you abandon? So here's a small example. I was doing a podcast for a little over a year. We did 177 episodes. It was called Question of the Day. In fact, a young man by the name of Tim Ferriss was a guest host on the podcast. My co-host on the podcast was Stephen Dubner, who was the co-writer of a little-known book called Freakonomics. And we were having success. We were the number one podcast in iTunes when we launched. And we were getting a good, we were always in the top 100 or so. We were getting a good amount of downloads per month. We were making a very nice profit on advertising. We did some live events

Starting point is 00:27:00 that were fun and were sold out. And Stephen were, and Steven and I are good friends. We were having just fun getting together and joking around for a few hours every day while being recorded. So everything was going well, but the number of downloads that we were getting, and this is almost a meaningless metric and in every other case. But the number of downloads was not going up. It wasn't going down, nor was it bad. It was enough to create a profitable business for everyone and to pay some employees and to take care of the people selling ads for us. So it was a great little business. It was a fun, creative podcast.

Starting point is 00:27:43 It was with my friends. We had many great guest hosts, including, you know, of course, Tim Ferriss, Brian Koppelman, the director of or the writer and creator of Billions and Rounders and other movies. Marina Franklin, who's one of my favorite comedians. We had all these great guest hosts, A., AJ Jacobs. We had so much fun doing it. And yet it didn't feel like something we should persist with because we knew the podcast audience in general was going up for the world. And we were wondering why our downloads were not going down, but they weren't going up either. So we felt like something was wrong. And after 177 episodes, we only had so many questions of the day left. And meanwhile, it was taking a lot of creative effort away from our other projects. For instance, our own individual podcasts, our writing, our other business endeavors. I miss doing the podcast. It was great. It was fun.

Starting point is 00:28:46 It was successful in terms of profits, but it wasn't going up. And sometimes to feed that extra bit of creativity, you need to have a sense that you're improving at what you do. And so even though there was no complaint and no criticism and everything was fine. We decided to give it up. Now, sometimes when you are learning and you feel like, oh, I'm learning really hard. I love playing golf, but I'm stuck at a five handicap. Sometimes you're at the top end of a learning curve where the subtleties of improvement are so nuanced that it becomes very difficult every little millimeter of improvement that you have. And yet, because you've learned at this point to appreciate those subtleties, that even though it feels like everything is going flat, it's those moments when you should persist the most because every little improvement

Starting point is 00:29:45 you have will feel so incredibly good. And I have felt this not only in business and in writing, but even in games like chess, where I'm a tournament chess player and I constantly seek to improve and I'm already at a high ranking. So every little improvement that I notice feels so pleasurable to me that I get to another level that even though it's not like I improve a lot, it just betters my life to see myself improve at that level. And there's many areas that I feel the same way, that I persist with. Now, what about when something is going poorly? There's many reasons why something could be going poorly. It could be nobody likes what you do.

Starting point is 00:30:32 It could be that your partners in something are no good or you don't enjoy being around them. It could be that financially you can't seem to figure it out. Either you're not making a profit or you're not raising money or you're not getting customers. So this obviously, it seems like most of the time you should abandon that situation. And I would agree with that. If you're running a business and no customers like what you do, there's a very big danger of smoking your own crack. That because you think it's a cognitive bias, that because you put so much time and effort and energy into thinking of the idea and building the idea or the product or the service, you think this must be good. Your brain tells you you would not have wasted that time on a bad idea. But the reality is you always have to take a step back.

Starting point is 00:31:22 And this is really important. I've had to do this on every business I've ever been involved with, both good and bad. You always have to take a step back and say, am I smoking crack about my own idea or should I put this down and move on to the next idea? asking that question every day and being very analytical about it and determining what metrics you're going to use to judge success in advance and seeing if you're meeting those metrics, that will tell you very clearly whether you should abandon something. So there was one period where I created several different websites at the same time. This is in the mid 00s to see if I should, if there's a business in any of these. And nine of the websites I created, no matter what I did, no matter what marketing I did, I just could not generate any traffic. And even members of my own family were telling me,

Starting point is 00:32:20 you know what? I would never use this website you created. Finally, I created a website, stockpicker.com, which it combined various loves of mine, my interest in finance, my interest in software, my interest in writing, and combine them all together in one site. And it was almost like this idea sex that created this one business idea. Within a month or so, I had millions of users. I had ads, everything. So I'm glad I very quickly abandoned the first nine ideas so I could focus on that 10th idea. So you have to recognize very quickly when something's A, not working out and and be not worth persisting in. Now, other times something might not be working out. Uh, so a recent example is I have been involved

Starting point is 00:33:14 in a great business, but it wasn't working out for me. I was having a problem with one of my partners. No, nobody's fault. It's just sometimes two people don't get along for various reasons or one person's busy on other projects while the other person wants to remain focused on the project in front of them. And so it wasn't working out for me. And I really felt like this business is not working out. It's going to cause a lot of problems for me personally and financially. And so I did consider abandoning it. But what I did was I persisted just a little bit. And I said, you know what, at the very least, let me explore buying this partner out. And so I pitched the business and all the numbers and everything to about five different people or companies. Three were interested. One did the deal.

Starting point is 00:34:07 And now I have a great partner, a thriving business, more profitable than ever. And it was an example of where something was not working out. In fact, it was just a personal disaster in many ways. And it ended up through a certain amount of persistence. And now I would say six or seven months of persistence that were painful many of those months, but it was worth it because I knew at the end, I had something really good and valuable that I personally could enjoy doing if I just had the right partner.

Starting point is 00:34:37 So you have to really identify the metrics by which something, by how you judge success and by whether something is either working or not working. So in the case of the podcast question of the day that I was doing with Stephen Dubner, the metric wasn't the number of downloads or the profits because both of those were doing well, but the rate of improvement. To use calculus, the first derivative of downloads was negative. And we decided that would be our metric. And we, and we got out so we could pursue things, uh, where the first derivative of improvement was positive, or we felt the growth. Uh, so that was

Starting point is 00:35:17 something that was mediocre that we decided to abandon as opposed to persist. And I had the sense with the thing that the business that wasn't working out because of the poor partner that, you know what, with the right combination of things and with the right fixes, which I could clearly imagine and picture, you know, i.e. I could find a different partner who could buy the first partner out, this has the potential to work. And I was correct and it worked, even though initially it was failing miserably,

Starting point is 00:35:54 at least personally for myself. That said, many times if you're writing a book and you're stuck for months and you have no idea how to continue, or if you have a business where there's no customers and you can't raise any money and it doesn't seem like there's any going to be any customers and you didn't properly picture an audience before you built the first product or the first service, many situations like that you should abandon. And sometimes when there's personal things happening in your life, that's also a good time to abandon projects. So one time I was starting a business and the business looked like it was going to go well, but I had a personal disaster, essentially a breakup. And I had to focus on family and friends and my own health in order

Starting point is 00:36:47 for me to be the best potential person I could be. And that one business did not require, you know, it wasn't like the world needed that business more than it needed a best potential version of me. So I decided to abandon it because of something unrelated to the business, but more a personal situation. So again, determine your metrics, be fluid, but every situation, whether it's working out, whether it's mediocre or whether it's doing well, you always have the option to not do it or to persist and improve, you know, and in other words, to either abandon or grow. So remember that it's not just about whether something's failing or succeeding. There's lots of metrics involved. Be clear about what

Starting point is 00:37:40 those metrics are and what's important to you from the beginning and use those metrics to determine what your next step should be. And you should always be thinking about what your next step should be. Don't get locked into any one path. We're free people. We're not in prison. So every day is a new choice to make. And thanks very much for asking me this question, Tim. Good luck. Hi, my name is Debbie Millman, and I am the host of the podcast Design Matters and chair of the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. You can find me at Debbie Millman on Twitter and Instagram. I recently met a very engaging young person and asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. Her answer astounded me, both in its optimism

Starting point is 00:38:33 and its confidence. When I asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she answered everything. I was the opposite. I went through a whole series of career aspirations, but never quite felt that I was good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, or thin enough to do much of anything, let alone everything. In 1979, when I went off to college, I decided that majoring in English literature would give me the most options to ultimately choose from, and I minored in Russian literature because I loved Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. I often joke now that I got my college degree in reading. Despite my grand dreams of being an artist or a writer, the lead gene in my decision-making was to be utterly self-sufficient. I never once felt

Starting point is 00:39:26 that I had what it took to make a living making art. My only marketable skills were the tasks I learned working at my college newspaper, basic design, layout, and paste-up of a publication. When I graduated college in 1983, my first job was in the design department of a cable magazine earning $6 an hour. I lived in a fourth floor tenement walk-up in Manhattan, and because my paychecks were so low and my rent was so high, I had to make a monthly decision about what I would use my money for, eating, rent, or paying off my student loan. When the first September came around after graduation and I felt the autumn in the air, I knew I had compromised, but I felt trapped. I could barely make enough money to pay my rent working as a commercial artist. How could I ever conceive of

Starting point is 00:40:18 making a living as an actual artist? I assumed it would be harder and never considered that I had any other choice. About a year later, I was offered a position in a real estate development company in Westchester as their director of marketing. It was a big title with a big increase in salary. Now I would be making $25,000 a year. And it came with a car. I took it. Everyone congratulated me on my good fortune and the potential of this prestigious new opportunity. But on my first day of my new job, I hated it so much that when I finally got home after my long commute, I climbed into bed, pulled the blankets over my head, and cried. I hated my new job for the entire time I was employed there.

Starting point is 00:41:16 I loathed the work, and I loathed real estate, and I loathed my very mean boss. And this was settling. This job and the job before that were jobs I had taken because I thought pursuing my dreams of being an artist or a writer were too hard. I was stubbornly persisting and pursuing and working hard at something I didn't even really want. Who was I kidding? Every job is hard. Design is hard and marketing is hard and working at McDonald's and Starbucks and Walmart is hard. Why does it feel easier to do something we don't love than do something we actually feel passionate about? I think we lose our courage to pursue our creative dreams when we feel that the

Starting point is 00:42:00 only way we can make a living is to conform. I realize now that making a living doing what I love requires a personal belief, and I need to have something meaningful to contribute. What makes this particularly difficult is that making a living doing what you love doesn't come with a real rule book. There's no one process for anything. So in many ways, making a living doing what you love is an anti-process. So if you are considering settling because going after what you want seems too hard to do, remember that hating what you do every day is even harder. The flip side of settling is infinite persisting. How long should you do something without the success you envision before giving up? When should you throw in the towel? How much

Starting point is 00:42:54 rejection is too much? My answer to this first is a question. How much do you want this? If you want it more than anything, I say keep on trying until you get it. It may require altering your approach, refining your ideas, perfecting your methodology, or revising your intent. But if you want it more than anything, I don't think you should ever give up. But you will also have to manage how you feel about rejection. Personally, I don't take rejection particularly well. I tend to take it very personally, and I get very dejected with myself. This will lead to my wanting to abandon my efforts or to throw in the towel. But then I try to remind myself that I don't know anybody that really puts their whole self into something who really feels any differently in

Starting point is 00:43:52 the face of rejection. Why would they? Why should they? If you want something badly enough in the face of rejection, you must keep persevering. Many, many, many, many people far greater than I have been rejected numerous times. And many of those people have ultimately achieved real greatness in spite of, or even because of the rejection. So this is the thing. I don't think rejection is ever final until you stop trying to succeed. Some questions I recommend you consider when thinking about settling. If you're willing to give up on your dream of doing what you love, ask yourself this. Why do you feel that you need to give up? Why do you feel that you should settle for something else? What are you most afraid of? Settling or hating what you do? Is it possible for you to continue to support yourself in other ways while you

Starting point is 00:44:56 experiment with your approach to fulfilling your dreams? If you feel that you are not capable of achieving your dreams, is it because you are really not capable of achieving them or because you're really afraid to put your whole heart in and try? What scares you more? Heartbreak or rejection? What scares you more? Resentment or rejection? And what scares you more, resentment or rejection? And what scares you more, regret or rejection? I had one student who told me that the main reason he was afraid of going after what he wanted was that if he didn't achieve it, he would die of heartbreak. Well, if you try as if your life depends on it and you don't give

Starting point is 00:45:47 up until you get what you love, I contend that you are far less likely to find yourself in that predicament. So this is the thing about persistence. If you're doing what you think you should be doing rather than what you want to do with your whole heart, you are not persisting. You are resisting the truth about who and what you are. If you're doing what it takes to make your heart sing, never, ever give up. Remember, it's not a failure until you accept defeat. Hey, Tim, thanks for having me back on. This is my third contribution to your podcast. The first was episode 210 and 219. And today you've asked me to address the question, when should you quit?

Starting point is 00:46:37 And before I go any further, if people want to know anything about me, they can follow my Twitter feed. I am Adam Robinson. Or they can, if they want to get in touch with me, they can email me at adam at robinsonglobalstrategies.com. So the question, when should you quit, is such an important question. And it brings up a whole related constellation of questions. For example, when should you quit a job versus when should you quit a relationship

Starting point is 00:47:08 or when should you quit a dream? They're all different questions. And when should you quit a dream? Like when should you give up on becoming an actor or making the NBA or launching a startup? Or when should you quit a job? Is the job satisfactory? Does it fulfill you? Is there another career path?

Starting point is 00:47:31 And we tend to romanticize persistence. There's that great Mark Twain quote, if at first you don't succeed, try again, then quit. You're just being a damn fool about it. And so the question is, when should you persist and when're just being a damn fool about it. And so the question is, when should you persist and when are you being a damn fool? And Rudyard Kipling once said, if you don't get what you want, it's a sign either that you didn't seriously want it or you tried to bargain over the price.

Starting point is 00:48:07 So you should quit if the price is too high. And sometimes it is. But you have to weigh that against how seriously you want something. And sometimes people think they want things, and it turns out they didn't really. All kinds of people say, oh, I want to write a book, or I want to run a marathon. And you ask them how many miles they've run or how many pages they've written that week. And you discover they haven't written anything or run anything. And so you have to question whether they seriously want something. But sometimes the price is just too high. But there are other reasons you should quit if a better opportunity comes along. In Silicon Valley, the ethos is fail quickly and iterate and move on to

Starting point is 00:48:48 the next version or next startup. You should quit if, you know, you should quit if you're trying to prove something, either to yourself or to other people, but especially if you're trying to prove something to other people. And if you're doing something merely because you feel you owe it to someone, definitely quit. But it's never a good motivation, and it will always lead to resentment either on your part or the other person's. And finally, I think you should quit if it's not fun, if you don't love it.

Starting point is 00:49:23 You ought to love what you're doing. I once read an interview of Baryshnikov, one of ballet's not fun, if you don't love it, you ought to love what you're doing. I once read an interview of Baryshnikov, one of ballet's greatest dancers, and he said it was just a job to him. He never really loved ballet, which was such a shock for me because he was such a brilliant dancer, and yet he never loved it. It was merely a job. And I think we owe it to ourselves. We owe it to the world to do things we love to do. And they're at least fun. Not all aspects of every pursuit are fun, but you should at least love it. So quit if the cost is too high.

Starting point is 00:49:57 Quit if you're doing it because you feel you owe it to someone or that you should do it. And quit if it's not fun. If you don't love it, quit. Move on to something else. So related to the question, when should you quit, is when should you not quit? And if it's merely a matter of obstacles, if you're running into roadblocks, I would say don't quit. There's that great quote, obstacles are what you see when you take your eye off the goal. If you seriously want something, if it's a mission, if it's a passion, don't give up merely because you've encountered obstacles. I'm reminded of the story, the tragic story of John Kennedy Toole.

Starting point is 00:50:41 John Kennedy Toole was a young man who committed suicide in 1969. He had written a book, A Confederacy of Dunces, and had sent it to dozens of publishers, and he got rejected across the board. And he killed himself in despair and depression, which is tragic. And his mother, Thelma, was obviously heartbroken. Imagine what she felt. And she was determined that her son's book would see the light of day. And mind you, it took her 11 years to get the book published, 11 years after her son's suicide. So it's an interesting contrast. The son committed suicide after a few dozen rejections. And we can only imagine his heartbreak. But imagine his mother's heartbreak.

Starting point is 00:51:36 And she was determined to see her son's legacy appear in print. And one of the persons she contacted repeatedly was the great Southern author Walker Percy, who persistently rejected her appeals as often as she persistently made them. And one day she showed up in Percy's office with the manuscript in hand, and he didn't have the heart to turn her away. So he thought he would read a few pages. And after a few pages, he realized the genius of the book. And with his endorsement, it was published and became a perennial bestseller. So again, you have the contrast between the son who committed suicide and the mother who persisted over the same same work so if it is merely obstacles don't give up if it's something if it's a mission if it's a

Starting point is 00:52:30 passion if it's something that you seriously want persist so let's say you know Tim that you should quit how do you quit often people don't quit because they're afraid to they're afraid that there's nothing on the other side. For example, people are afraid especially to quit a relationship when they know they should, but they don't. They persist. They're afraid. They're afraid of hurting their partner's feelings. Or they're afraid that maybe they're not lovable or they won't find a partner afterwards.

Starting point is 00:53:02 There are times when people have put so much into something that they persist merely because they've invested a lot of time or money or emotion, which is known in behavioral finance as the sunk cost fallacy. So the more you put into something, the more you're invested in it, and the harder it is to quit. So if you're going to quit, it's best to do so as soon as you can, as soon as you recognize you ought to, because the longer you stay, the harder it will be to quit and the more cost it'll be when you eventually do. So one reason the sunk cost fallacy is

Starting point is 00:53:41 so hard to escape is we recognize the cost of something. And what we don't reckon is the opportunity cost in holding on. As long as you hold on to something that's not providing you satisfaction, that's not fulfilling your dream, then you're passing up all the opportunities that await you when you do let go of whatever you're holding onto. Again, whether it's a job or a relationship or a dream. So if you find it hard to quit, focus on the opportunities that you're passing up

Starting point is 00:54:20 in staying, in persisting. And I think the last two points I'd like to make are if you know you're going to persist, but it's difficult and you feel like quitting, but you know you shouldn't, then one way to persist and to stay in the game is to connect your dream to a mission, to something larger than yourself. Because you may not feel that you want to persist.

Starting point is 00:54:47 You may not want it anymore, but the mission is larger than you. And if you can make the dream larger than yourself, if you can connect it to a mission, you'll be able to persist despite the obstacles. And the last thing is, sometimes there's a black and white, should you persist or quit, but there's a gray area. And the gray area is maybe you should pivot. For example, maybe your dream was to become a player in the NBA. And maybe you felt that dream and should quit, but maybe you could become a coach in the NBA, right? Or a talent scout. Or maybe you can own an NBA team. There are many ways that you can realize aspects of a dream.

Starting point is 00:55:37 And one thing to think about is why you want the dream in the first place. So, for example, if someone said he wanted to become an actor because he wanted to become well-known, well, maybe there are other ways to become well-known. Maybe you could become a well-known director or a well-known writer, screenwriter. There are other ways to fulfill your dreams. So sometimes you want to pivot on the dream as opposed to giving it up or persisting in that dream. So your choice is not the binary one, persist or quit. It's not black and white. It's persist, pivot or quit.

Starting point is 00:56:23 Hey, everybody out there in Tim land. How's it going? Tim, thanks for having me on the show. It's persist, pivot, or quit. and entrepreneurship. We've got 10 million students. We're online at creativelive.com. We've had billions of minutes streamed. It's a great place to learn from folks like Tim, Gary Vaynerchuk, Mark Cuban, Richard Branson in the entrepreneurship space, and then the top designers, photographers, you name it. There's a super highly curated group of folks you can learn from. In a previous world, and I think maybe a lot of you may know me as a photographer, I found a successful career there, developed the first iPhone app that shared photos to social networks called Best Camera. Anyway, that's a little bit about me. Where to find me on the internet? I'm at Chase Jarvis on everything. That's YouTube, Instagram,

Starting point is 00:57:23 Twitter, Facebook, etc. And I'd also appreciate if you check out at Creative Live, which is their, that's their handle on every place as well. I want to answer the question that Tim put forward about how do we know when to persist or to push on versus calling it quits. I think this is a fascinating question. And I'm going to try and put my answer into two buckets. I think it's a two-part answer. First, I value intuition massively. I think over the next, as we tap into human potential and we have from biochemical stuff to mindfulness, to all this stuff. I think we're going to find over the course of the next chapter, the near term of history here, that intuition is the most powerful tool that we have as humans. And, you know, within the concept of

Starting point is 00:58:18 intuition and listening to that voice inside you, there are two ways of thinking about that. One is just the one, your gut. You can feel it in your body. You know the right answer every time you've looked back, whether to keep dating this person or to bail on this job and get a new one. I think we can most always say that at our core, we had a really strong feeling one way or another. The second part of intuition, which I think is really interesting to Tim's audience because of the background that Tim has, you know, calls himself the human guinea pig. Tim, we love you. But there's a scientific rigor that goes around with that. And so if intuition is a little bit squishy for you while you're listening to this, there is a new philosophy or rather theory coming out about intuition that I'm hearing more about recently. And I can't, I'm sorry, I can't quote the studies.

Starting point is 00:59:13 Maybe Tim can. But it's that our bodies are recording data all the time, our memories, our emotions, all those things. That's the equivalent of RAM. You know, we take in however like a billion pieces of data a minute or a second or something like that, and we only make use of a very small amount. And the way I do think about this is the equivalent of RAM in a computer, like what's right there on the surface or just below the surface that we can recall. And this theory about intuition is that while we are recording these billions of data points throughout our entire life, moment to moment, that we do actually have an archive of those

Starting point is 00:59:53 in our body, in the cells of our body. And that intuition is sort of the parsing, the, what is it called when you refactor, like you go back and you look at data that's already there, but you have to you put it through a different process. And to me, this process is intuition. So it's the answers like you would have come into contact throughout your life with a bunch of things that would inform this particular decision, even though they're not in your sort of conscious working memory and whether that bears out to be true or some other version of it you know part one of my answer is that you know in your gut deeply around intuition whether something is worth pursuing or not so there's both the the instinct part which is the feeling and then whether something is worth pursuing or not. So there's both the instinct part, which is the feeling, and then there's this, what I'm saying is a new,

Starting point is 01:00:52 more scientific approach to what data in the body feels like and that that's actually intuition. And I believe, you know, summarily on this first point of intuition is that there's going to be huge strides in the next short term about how valuable this is. Every creator that I know who has made really successful things, not all successes, but has that you would look up to and say, well, that person's a badass. Every time I've talked to them, there's been a really strong element of intuition. Now we can be wrong about that and there's all kinds of other theories, but that's mine. Point one. So point two is this con a concept, a rubric,

Starting point is 01:01:40 a series of questions that I ask myself. This is maybe more in a spot on in Tim's, you know, way of approaching something, but it's a couple of questions that one can ask one's self to determine whether to call it quits or to keep going. Well, the two questions are, is this something that brings me joy and, or is this working? working? Am I making progress? And that progress can be internal progress, external progress. Do you have the concept of progress? Is the thing that you're doing working in some capacity? That's question one. And then question two is, do I still care about this? Do I believe deeply in the mission or the vision of what I'm talking about doing such that I'm willing to endure? It's a very simple two question paradigm

Starting point is 01:02:35 because you could see a world where if these things are in, if, if, is it working? Yes. Do I believe in it? Yes. Well, shit, obviously you're going to keep going, right? That's a no brainer. Is this working? No, man, I hate it. I'm miserable. It sucks. Do I care about what I'm doing? Do I believe in it? No, I used to care about that one, you know, a long time ago. Now I don't. Okay. That's really obvious that you wouldn't continue. It's, it's calls into question though. What about when these two things are conflict in conflict? Is it working? Yeah, it's working great, but I don't believe in it. Then you have to go like, ah, so should I keep doing it? Or in the spirit of the question, is this working? Not really. Is it bringing me joy or is it hard?

Starting point is 01:03:17 How do I know when to tweak and keep pushing? And if say it's not working, but you still believe deeply in it, then you have to consider the upside. So this is a structure that I got from a friend named Chris Guillebeau. I think it's one of the most powerful frameworks that we can have because knowing that what we're working on is the right thing when we're all limited by time, I think is a massive advantage. It's not just work harder. It's not just work longer, but it's work smarter. And this is one of the, I think, a key way of thinking about it.

Starting point is 01:03:56 And Chris has a quote that I think is worth noting. And that's, you know, he studied all kinds of people in his book, Born for This. It's a great book that he studied all kinds of people who had book, Born for This. It's a great book that he studied all kinds of people who had had, you know, gone through these, these, the process of trying to make a living in a life, doing what they loved. And it wasn't that like stubbornness and pushing through was the thing that predicted success. In Chris's words, flexibility was the number one predictor of success. And again, the framework, ask yourself, is it working? And two, do I still believe?

Starting point is 01:04:32 And usually you can, you know, through that two by two, you can narrow down a lot of the information such you can focus on, you know, is it working? Do I still believe? And I think I'll give some personal examples where I've used this framework. I think we have to at first address, before we get into my specific examples, the concept of winners or success. And we have a, what I believe is a false narrative in our culture that says that winners, they just pull those through at all costs and they never quit. And to that, I say bullshit. I think winners quit all the time.

Starting point is 01:05:12 And it's understanding, A, your intuition and B, having a framework for decision making that I'm sharing with you here that helps winners understand when and why to quit. Winners quit all the time. My personal example, I've got a, just from a career perspective, a couple of things that I quit. I was a successful soccer player as a young kid. I went to college on a soccer scholarship. I played on the United States Olympic development team. I had a very clear path to being able to continue on and play professionally. And I looked at that and it said, is it working? What's your intuition? My intuition says, I think I might be done. Okay, well then let's go to this rubric. Is it working? Are you getting joy from this? Yeah, it's clearly working. I'm good at it. I'm making all of the teams and whatnot.

Starting point is 01:06:06 Do I still believe in the mission that if you can play professional sports, you should? That was a red X for me. And without going into the details, I think it's a little bit superfluous for this conversation. But again, it's this framework that was really quickly able to help me get to a decision that I needed to quit playing soccer after my senior year in college so that I could go on and do other things. The same is true from there. I was bound for medical school. I took all the prerequisites and the MCAT and did all that stuff. And is it working? Yes, it's working. I have an opportunity to go to medical school. Do I believe in it? At some point, I stopped believing in it because I realized that I was

Starting point is 01:06:56 going to become a doctor for all of the wrong reasons. The reasons that I was the only person in my household to complete college. And if you're going to be, that, you know, I was the only person in my household to, you know, complete college. And if you're going to be, quote, socially successful, then you are either the doctor or a lawyer or a pro athlete, see, you know, earlier point. And, you know, it was very clear to me using this rubric of intuition plus, you know, these two questions that it wasn't for me. And, you know, one other thing that I quit is I then went to, I was going around experimenting. I then entered a program where I was gonna get a PhD in philosophy, the philosophy of art.

Starting point is 01:07:32 What I also quit that two years in. And I think an important aspect is this, you've heard the iteration. This is what I was doing. I was exploring each of these things and realizing that despite I had aptitude in each of them, I stopped believing in the mission. And in case you're wondering if you should push on in a world where you don't believe in the mission, but it's working, to me that is the failure of the opportunities that we have as humans to pursue the things that we love with joy.

Starting point is 01:08:11 And my belief is that when you talk to the most successful people, and success can be by any myriad of definitions, that there was a mission and or a vision that was greater than themselves. And they were very passionate about it such that when shit got hard and it 100% will get hard that you have the energy and the stamina, stamina is a key word here, to push through. And if you're working on, say, something different than you're passionate about, you passionate about, it's just a market opportunity where you can go, quote, make a bunch of money. And when shit gets super hard, are you going to believe enough to push through? And the answer generally I find when people are pursuing money or just some random market opportunity, that they lack the conviction necessary to succeed or to push through when you should push through.

Starting point is 01:09:06 So I'm going to wrap it up and say thanks, Timbo, for asking the question, having me on the show. Just to recap, I believe in two buckets, one considering the question, how do you know when to push on or to call it quits? And first, intuition. Intuition is both that feeling you have in your gut and then for the folks that are a little less woo-woo and a little more scientific, I believe we'll see a lot of science that's in the near future and it's just starting to emerge

Starting point is 01:09:34 around the data that is stored in the body that we have a slower ability to recall or it's recalled in a different way than just in the mindfulness. That's one of the reasons that intuition feels like a gut feeling. And then the second part is this sniff test that I'm borrowing from my friend Chris Guillebeau from the book Born for This. And that's asking yourselves two questions. One, is it working? Are you finding success? And two, do I still believe in the mission? And if those are both aligned, then you don't have to dig deeper. It's only when they're in conflict do you have to say,

Starting point is 01:10:12 like, is this still working? Yes or no? And do you still believe? So I hope that's helpful. Timbo, keep doing what you're doing. And to all those listeners out there, again, I'm Chase Jarvis. You can find me at Chase Jarvis.

Starting point is 01:10:24 And I would love it if you'd pay attention to Creative Live. Thanks, y'all. Hello, everyone. This is Rhonda Patrick. I am a PhD scientist. But what I'm arguably more well-known for, as opposed to any bench work I've done in the lab, is my science communication efforts online, especially through my YouTube channel and my iTunes podcast

Starting point is 01:10:45 called Found My Fitness. That's foundmyfitness, all one word. In fact, how I ended up doing that in the first place is a little bit of a story of having to choose one of two somewhat diverging paths. And for that reason, might speak a little bit to Tim's theme question for this podcast episode, which is how do you decide when to persist or when to call it quits? So in order for that to make any sense, I think it's helpful to sort of have a little background on the typical career progression for a PhD scientist. The epitome of academic success is to land a tenure-track faculty position and have your own research lab, preferably at a good university and ideally in a

Starting point is 01:11:25 city that you'd like to live in. But to give you an example of what it takes to get there, only around 65% of all PhD holders actually go on to do what's known as a postdoc, which is around a four to five year continued training intermediate step towards professorship. And only about 15 to 20 percent of those postdocs then go on to a tenure track faculty position. And then for those that actually get to the faculty position stage, the average time it takes to get funded on a big R01 NIH grant is about four to five years because all the junior faculty members are competing with the well-established, famous, already tenured faculty for funding.

Starting point is 01:12:08 Getting that R01 NIH grant is actually a crucial step because it's what ultimately secures a professor's tenureship in the long run. So while Found My Fitness was what I would call, you know, in its early embryonic stage of development towards the end of my graduate studies, it was still enough to get the attention of at least one of the professors that I was interviewing with for a postdoc position who happened to be at one of the more prestigious institutes that I interviewed at. It's important to know that what was particularly impressive about this lab was that a whopping 80% of all postdocs in this lab went on to secure tenure track faculty positions.

Starting point is 01:12:51 The problem was, is that it was put to me in no uncertain terms that at this point I would have to give up my little side project to found my fitness, like completely full stop. And this represents, you know, the first of two major crossroads I encountered. This could have been and actually should have been a tremendously anxiety-provoking moment for me. I mean, consider those statistics I just gave you a moment ago, each stage of the academic funnel narrowing precipitously, with only 15 to 20 percent of postdocs ordinarily moving on to that final stage of, you know, tenure track professorship. And all the factors leading to that point also play a role.

Starting point is 01:13:31 So the impact factor of the journal that you publish in and indeed the lab that you do your postdoc in are all very important. But the good news is, is that at least in this particular case, I actually had a get out of jail free card. While the vast majority of my professional mentors urged me to go with option A post haste, even being a little bit pissed off at me for dragging my feet a little bit, option B ended up being a perfect fit for me. A much smaller institution, but the opportunity to work with one of the greats in science, Dr. Bruce Ames. Not only did this actually end up being a good opportunity, but in fact, there was better overlap with what I was doing with my side project because Bruce's research at the time was focused at looking at the effects that micronutrients and nutrition had on biomarkers of aging and

Starting point is 01:14:21 inflammation and metabolic disease in humans, which actually is a pretty broad canvas if you think about it. You know, unfortunately, as a result of the somewhat perverse influence of funding mechanisms on science, many scientists can actually be forced into a very narrow field and, you know, they're forced to ask narrower and narrower questions throughout the course of their career to the point where they not only don't have time to do any other side projects, but they may not even have the opportunity to research something outside of a specific protein that they're looking at. And that's the reality of science, you know, unless you're very lucky or you plot your course very carefully. So ultimately, passing up the quote-unquote sure thing to do something that more coincides with your natural passions is a little bit riskier, but in my opinion, it's the more rewarding path. The second stubbornly persist versus call it quits crossroads that I faced was probably towards the very end of my postdoc when I was being pursued for a

Starting point is 01:15:25 tenure-track faculty position by a good university. They wanted me to spend about 50% of my time lecturing students and the other 50% of my time starting a lab and writing grants. While this wasn't the same thing as telling me I had to shut my podcast down, the responsibilities would imply it. And this was actually a much harder choice for me because I didn't have a get out of jail free card this time. And I knew that if I put found my fitness aside, that it would surely be dead in the water. So when faced with a crossroads decision like this, I think it's helpful to weigh in a few factors. For me, it came down mainly to impact.

Starting point is 01:16:06 If I valued, for example, teaching, which I do, then as a professor, I can expect to spend about 50% of my time doing just that. But, you know, the conventional teaching model still championed today is one that really doesn't scale. So if you consider the average university classroom size, that's anywhere between 25 to 55 students on average, depending on the institution. But if we compare that to a video lecture, for example, in my experience, a bare minimum of 10 to 12% of views or viewers conservatively will watch an entire video from start to finish, regardless of how long the video is or what the content is about. And I consider these quote unquote real views on a video because they hold the most likeness to a traditional classroom because the viewer is actually consuming all of

Starting point is 01:16:59 the content in a way it was intended. So even if your video flops and only gets like a few thousand views in the long run, you still have the equivalent to, you know, an exceptionally large classroom hear what you've had to say. By thinking about impact in this way, I think it's clear that as a teaching apparatus, even a video that is not very successful is still probably way more successful

Starting point is 01:17:21 than a typical lecture. So while I did not end up pursuing the university position, instead choosing to focus on Found My Fitness, that decision was not without its own anxiety. Ultimately, you know, passing up an opportunity like that means it may be very difficult or altogether unlikely that it will come around again. But since then, you know, I've continued my academic writing. I've met many leading scientists, you know, as a function of the interviews I conduct.

Starting point is 01:17:49 And when I conduct an interview, I also try to read as much of the work the scientist has done as they possibly can. So by necessity, I feel that if anything, you know, I continue to broaden my expertise in a way that at least shares some overlap with what I would have done, you know, in my responsibilities as an investigator. Finally, one thing I should mention, you know, when faced with a decision where you have to choose one path over another, I think it really helps to have done the work to make the decision easy. So if we go back to our conversation about measuring impact, I actually might have chosen differently at my personal crossroads if Found My Fitness had not already reached a level of community interest that merited my belief

Starting point is 01:18:31 it could actually go further and become something bigger. That meant having a few videos or conversations that I'd already done under my belt on my channel that had enough of those quote-unquote real views I mentioned earlier that actually could fill an imaginary small baseball stadium. It also meant that I was fortunate enough to have already reached that 1,000 true fans milestone articulated by Kevin Kelly. In other words, actual supporters willing to put a few bucks on the line to keep things going. So I think that when you put the hard work in today, you make those transition decisions so much easier. And of course, a little good luck and opportunity along the way helps too. So that's my story. Thank you for listening.

Starting point is 01:19:17 Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness

Starting point is 01:20:03 before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by 99designs. I've used 99designs for ages, since even before podcasting was a thing. And I've used them for all sorts of graphic design needs. They are fast, and they are convenient. So whether you need a logo, website, book cover, or anything else, I've done competitions, for instance, for book covers related to the 4-Hour Body.

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Starting point is 01:21:58 This episode is brought to you by Shopify. I have known and loved Shopify just about forever. Back in 2009, when they had something like eight or 10 employees, now they have more than 2000. I helped them as an advisor to create the Build a Business competition, which is now the world's largest entrepreneurship competition. And many readers of my blog, first-time business owners have ended up making millions and millions of dollars each, many of them as side gigs to their full time jobs. So the goal of the build a business competition is to get would be entrepreneurs to get off the couch and make things happen. All you have to do

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #254: When to Quit - Lessons from World-Class Entrepreneurs, Investors, Authors, and More

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