“…winners quit a lot. That’s how they win”
That’s the final line of Annie Duke’s Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away.
The book contains an incredible density of practical wisdom for those of us in the business of building things. Today I’m talking about deciding which game you’re playing, and why winners quit.
Duke tells the story of Stewart Butterfield, the founder of Slack. His story is wild. Twice he set out to build gaming companies, and twice those games failed. In both cases, a piece of technology developed for the game became a big success; first Flickr, and then Slack.
Here’s the thing: in both cases, Butterfield realized that the original plan wasn’t going to work, and decided to quit. For a startup founder, or really anyone who has convinced a lot of people to follow them, quitting is an incredibly charged decision.
I think Butterfield was able to make this call, which in both cases netted out as an overall win, because he decided that the game he was playing wasn’t that of building a gaming company, but of building something great. His first step was to build a game, but when he saw that it wouldn’t achieve greatness, he quit that path and started down another. Had he been unable or unwilling to quit that path, Flickr and Slack never would have come to be.
When you’re faced with a decision, you’d always do well to reconsider and recenter your framework around the game you’re playing. What does winning look like? What would you consider a success in the long run, and does quitting the current path help or hinder your chances of achieving it?
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I cannot recommend this book highly enough. You should read it. And then message me and we can talk about it.