This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. In 1976, the Austrian Formula One racer Nicky Lauda was involved in a fiery crash at the German Grand Prix. Taking a 150 mph turn, he swerved off the track and hit a fence. His racing car exploded into flames. Another car crashed into his vehicle.
The Associated Press reported what happened next. The race was restarted, but for Lauda, it was a race for life. While his fellow drivers jockeyed for position, he was being rushed to an intensive care unit with severe burns, fractures and lung damage.
Surgeons pronounced he was near to death and last rights were administered. But Nicky Lauda refused to give up. He not only came back from near death, but in the weeks that followed, he staged one
of the most astonishing recoveries in sports history. Just 40 days after doctors had given up hope and a priest had knelt at his bedside, the
Austrian ace climbed back into the cockpit of his glaring red Ferrari.
Nicky Lauda returned to the track barely a month after he was presumed dead.
His miracle recovery had more to do with his iron will than with master surgery. In an interview, Nicky Lauda made clear that quitting was not something he ever considered. The annals of sports and business and science are filled with stories like this. Hearing them can give us the courage to confront challenges in our own lives. But do they always give us the right message? Today, we kick off a month-long series where we'll examine the psychological factors that shape whether we achieve our goals. We're calling it Success 2.0. We begin with an overlooked component of success, the fine line between staying the course and stubbornness this week on Hidden Brain. What makes a person successful? Many people would say it's the capacity to start a promising venture and see it through to completion. At the University of Chicago, economist John List agrees that grit and determination are vitally important. But in his life and his research, he's found there's a secret ingredient to success that is often not given the Hollywood treatment.
John List, welcome to Hidden Brain. Hey, thanks so much for having me, Shankar. John, in the early 2000s, you took a leave from your academic position to become a senior economist in the White House. You were advising the administration of President George W. Bush. While you were there, you worked on a piece of legislation that was very important to you.
What was this legislation? The legislation was called the Clear Skies Act or the Clear Skies Initiative. And the idea was to create a cap and trade scheme that would try to combat socks, knocks
and mercury from power plants. Socks refers to sulfur dioxide, knocks refers to nitrogen oxide.
Both are harmful to our lungs. And the cap and trade scheme was kind of neat because it was an auction system along with a cap that attempted to really lower these emissions. I think in the end, it was to clean up local air pollution problems, but also to take a
bite out of climate change and long term issues, too. My Clear Skies legislation will cut power plant pollution and improve the health of our citizens. Four years of debate is enough. I urge Congress to pass legislation that makes America more secure and less dependent on
foreign energy. So you walked into this legislation. What happened to it?
Did it go to Congress for a vote? Yes, I worked pretty hard on it. That was one of the first issues I worked on. And we worked a fair amount with Senator James Inhofe, who was a chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, worked a lot with Hillary Clinton, who was a very important member of the Environment and Public Works. And we worked for about a year with them. The Clear Skies first Senate hearing was actually on April 8th, 2003. And lo and behold, I was sitting on pins and needles waiting for the news to come back. And I received word back from the folks in Senator Clinton's camp and Senator Inhofe's camp.
Then they told me both Republicans and Democrats voted no against the Clear Skies initiative.
Like unanimously they voted no? That's what I understood. This was behind closed doors. But they told me that both Democrats and Republicans hated my initiative. Why was that, John? So what they had said was the Democrats wanted something more progressive. They wanted carbon in the Clear Skies initiative and the Republicans wanted something a little bit less ambitious in terms of having mercury in the bill. So this was sort of a bill written by me in line with what the White House wanted. But it was really a bill that had no supporters when it came to that subcommittee.
Wow. So the Democrats wanted to have carbon in the bill and wouldn't support it if it didn't. And the Republicans wanted to scale down the provisions involving mercury. And they wouldn't support it unless it did. And between the two of those things, the bill basically didn't go anywhere. How did you feel when the news came down, John?
Well, gosh, this is roughly nine, 10, 11 months on this bill. And I thought that we had the economic issues taken care of. I thought we had the political issues taken care of.
So when that news came down, I mean, I was devastated.
Did you try and fight to get it back on the calendar to keep it alive? Oh, absolutely. You know, you don't write something like this and just give up so quickly. So of course I fought and fought to get them to reconsider because I was thinking, look, I've spent all of this time and I don't want all of that time to be wasted. So I went back to them again and again in meetings and I still thought that there was a glimmer of hope.
But in the end, it just didn't come to fruition. It was not until John left government that he realized he had made a crucial mistake. There were things he could have accomplished, but he was so focused on the clear skies initiative that he didn't have time to get to goals that were actually within reach. Sometime later, John came by another striking example. This time, an entire company was doing something very similar to what he had done in government. John was working at the time as the chief economist of the right sharing company, Lyft.
The company was actively working on a new initiative to increase customer loyalty. Makes perfect sense, right? Once you attract the customer, it's important to retain that customer. So one thing that a lot of firms do is they develop things like membership programs. So Lyft was considering introducing a membership program that we called Lyft Pink. And that membership program was something along the lines of you pay an upfront fee
and then you receive perks such as discounted rides as you take more trips on Lyft.
And did you think that this was going to work? I actually didn't for a few reasons, but most importantly, we did a number of experiments, exploring different upfront fees, like $9.99, $10.99, $19.99, these monthly fees, and then looking at different things like discount rates, 10% off, 20% off, et cetera. And what we kept finding is that people just continue to consume the number of Lyft rides
at the same rate that they did before the membership program. So you had these reservations and you must have shared these reservations with your colleagues.
Did they listen to you? Oh, absolutely. I shared them. And what I shared with them is that we have to be really careful when we roll this out. So they took account of our research and our data, but they still decided to roll out Pink in a slightly different way. They rolled it out in the end of December of 2019 and they did tweak some things based
on our data. As John's experiments had predicted, the loyalty program didn't really catch on.
But by this time, a lot of people at the company had spent a lot of time working on Lyft Pink. Now I left Lyft in the spring of 2022, but by the time I left, it was still sputtering along. And what has recently happened in October of 2022, Lyft actually reintroduced Lyft Pink. And I think in part it was because the original membership program just wasn't working that
well for them. In some ways they were doing what you did when you were in the White House, which is
they had an idea, they loved the idea and they wanted to stick at it. I think that parallel is spot on. So they had an idea that really didn't look great right away. So what they did is they went and they tinkered with it a little bit. And when you look at the new Lyft Pink, by and large, it's kind of the same structured
program. John says this impulse to stick with it is something he's seen in both his professional and in his personal life. In 2015, he and his wife found they had hit a rough patch in their marriage.
Yeah, that's kind of a tough one. Now I've never talked about this publicly, but let's give it a try since maybe it can
help others work their way through a difficult moment in their own relationship. John and his wife had been high school sweethearts, but after many years together, he felt things
between them were no longer working. And this really caused me to step back and think about whether I should end the marriage. And I started to think, well, look, I have five kids and those kids back then were aged nine to 16. I've invested a lot in this relationship and this family. And I don't want to waste that. This is my high school sweetheart, somebody who I started dating when she was 15 and I was 16. So I decided to give it a go and, you know, the next several months were difficult. By the time the summer rolled around, you know, I was holed up mentally. I was keeping everything in. I was making occasional snide comments to my wife. I really wasn't a great husband or a great father. So I said, well, give it some more time.
And then six more months went by and I found myself even more miserable and making my wife's life miserable. And of course, it turned out that the kids were not that happy either. And that's when I asked for a divorce. And this, of course, was a very difficult decision because it went against everything that I had been taught. You don't quit things. I was raised Catholic and my aunt is a nun. And I really felt it was important to keep the family intact, especially for the kids. And I just realized that I was growing tired of making the rest of the family suffer during these dreadful times.
And that's when I decided to ask for a divorce at that point. So on the one hand, I hear what you're saying, because you're saying you weren't exactly sure what you wanted to do or how you were going to feel. So giving it some time to establish for yourself how you were going to feel was important. But I think I also heard you say that in that period of time, you know, six months a year, you were not the nicest person to be around and you might not have been the best husband and you might not have been the best father. And so there was in some ways a cost to your decision, not just for yourself, but to the people around you.
Oh, that's absolutely right. If I could go back and avoid putting those costs on my kids and my ex-wife now, I surely would have wanted to take that away. And that's the important part of this, because when you think about ending a relationship, what's difficult is it's hard to see around the corner about what's going to happen, not only for you, but also for your loved ones. And that's a very difficult part of making a decision of change or of pivoting, because
you're just not sure what's around the next corner. Looking back now, do you think you made the right decision?
Oh, I absolutely made the right decision for everyone, not only for my kids, not only for my ex-wife, but also for me. And importantly, everyone got around that corner, and everyone is healthy and happy. Their mental health, their physical health is in place. My ex-wife has a wonderful partner. I have a wonderful partner. This is a win-win-win all around. And I would hate to see what would have happened had I stuck it out. It would have been a very difficult set of days and months and years for the kids and
my ex-wife and me. Many guidebooks tell us how to start things, how to create things and how to complete things. It's far less common to hear advice on when to quit things. Why is that? That's when we come back. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Economist John List studies how people make choices. At the University of Chicago, he explores how we allot time, energy and resources to various demands in our lives. He's found that in many domains, personal, professional, political, many of us have a problem with quitting.
Once we sink our teeth into something, we become the proverbial dog with a bone. We won't let go. We can't let go. Based in part on his own experiences with stubbornness, John has spent time trying to understand the psychological and cultural forces that keep us from quitting things we ought to let go. And John, I understand that you grew up in a small town in Wisconsin.
Tell me about your family and upbringing. So I was raised in a small village called Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, just outside of Madison, Wisconsin. My grandfather was a truck driver. My dad was a truck driver. My brother is a truck driver. My mother is a secretary. And I think it's fair to describe our family and our upbringing as one that was very warm and very loving, but one that was also disciplined, and essentially the proverbial blue collar
family. I want to play you a clip from a man who is worshipped around Wisconsin and also lots
of other places in the United States. I've been around winners. I've been around high performance people all my life. People in all walks of life, people in the military, people in government, world-class athletes, great coaches, people in the private sector, such as a lot of you. What do they do? It's my intention this evening to hold up for you a mirror, a mirror that you can look into and examine for yourself the breadth and the depth of your goals and the commitment
and the discipline and the perseverance you bring to the pursuit of those goals, a mirror
that you can look into. John, tell me about your family's love affair with the famous football coach of the Green
Bay Packers, Vince Lombardi. That's right. When you watch the Super Bowl, at the end, they give a trophy, and the trophy is called the Lombardi Trophy, Vince Lombardi, and he is nothing short of a god around Wisconsin. He was the football coach, and he said things like, winners never quit and quitters never win, and he spoke to my family as if he was one of us.
He spoke to the blue-collar types of my world as if he was a god. Now the Packers won the first two Super Bowls, and of course, Vince Lombardi now has been elevated to the realm of legend, I would say. But as you say, in your family, he was more than just a football coach. He was his ideas, his thinking. He's defined the way your family thought about what was right and what was wrong.
Oh, that's right. I mean, Vince Lombardi's words, they were a way of life, and they were words to follow
to lead a better life. I understand that as a teenager, some of the spirit fed into your love for the sport of golf.
Tell me how you engaged with this sport, John. Yeah, absolutely. So I started playing golf at a very young age, not necessarily because my family played golf, but because we had neighbors who played golf, and then I could go with my neighbors to the golf course, and I fell in love with golf. I played in my first golf tournament when I was eight years old, and I ended up winning the tournament. So I was pretty good at golf at a young age. I never received any formal lessons of any sort at all. We didn't have money for lessons, and golf was a passion that I was pretty good at, and I realized through high school that golf could be my avenue to actually be able to go to college, and I ended up getting recruited by the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, and they gave me a partial golf scholarship, and I think that's really the only reason
why I went to college. This must have been a heady time.
Did you actually consider the possibility of going pro? Yeah, absolutely. I was coming into the university as a very accomplished golfer. I had played against some of the best competition around America throughout my high school days and in summer tournaments, and I had very high aspirations that I could eventually become a professional golfer.
Now, you came home from college one weekend and spent a day playing golf at a local club.
I understand you ran into a couple of golfers you used to compete against in high school? Yeah, that's exactly right. That first fall, actually, of my freshman year at Stevens Point, we had a weekend off of golf, and I ended up coming home. It was a Friday, and I went out to a country club in Madison called Cherokee Country Club, and I went out there with a few friends, and as it happens, there were people like Steve Stricker there, Cherry Kelly was there, and other very good college golfers, and I noticed something. I noticed they were hitting the ball a lot further than me. They were shaping the ball from right to left and left to right at their wish. They were hitting low balls, high balls. They were doing everything that I've kind of dreamed of being able to do consistently, but I thought to myself, look, it's warm-ups, and I always get strokes back. Back around the green, because I'm a really good potter, and I have a really good shipping game, so let's see what happens, because everyone was going out on the course that day. This was kind of fun, because I was thinking to myself, is I teed off on the first tee? Same course, same weather conditions, me against them, and let's see what happens at the end of the round when we bring our scores in. And what happened?
Now comes some more bad news, because these guys are coming in, shooting 67, 68, 69, which is like five under par, four under par, et cetera, and I didn't play that poorly, and I ended up shooting 75, which is like three over par. These guys are beating me by six, seven, eight strokes. And I'm thinking, wow, these guys are a lot better than I remember them being, and I'm
not as good compared to these guys as what I remembered. For the non-golfers in our audience, what does that difference in strokes mean, John?
Is that something that's a trivial difference? Oh, I wish it was a trivial difference. So all of us are familiar with grades. I want you to think about their grade as an A or an A plus, and I want you to think about
my grade as probably a D minus, so that's the totally different ends of the distribution. So that must have been very disturbing to you. What happened?
Did you try and get to the bottom of this achievement gap? Oh, absolutely. So it was disturbing, but I said, look, it was one round. And I started to think, you know, maybe one round, it's not so bad. So I started to do research that night, actually, that Friday night. So this is the fall of 1987. No internet. I had to go to the local library, and I had to page through local sports pages to look for golf scores. And I spent all that night, I spent the next day Saturday, I said, I'm not going to go out golfing. I'm going to do research. I'm going to gather data. I spent all morning and afternoon on Sunday.
And as I was driving back to the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point that Sunday night, I was devastated because I realized that they were killing me the last few years. They had improved at such a strong clip, and I hadn't. So this all came to me that it doesn't really matter if I keep working hard, that dream is done. But then what also came up was optimism, because I realized that there might be something else that I could be good at, and I can move my attention to a different kind of activity. What was this something else? That something else turned out to be economics. And I realized that I naturally think like an economist. I was learning about opportunity cost and thinking on the margin and all of these foundational concepts, and everyone around me was having trouble understanding these concepts and understanding how to use them. But for me, I looked around and I said to myself, wow, this is just how I think about the world. This is just my natural way of using critical thinking skills. So at the same time I was being devastated, I was learning about a new world that I was
really fascinated with, and I was realizing I was pretty good at it, good at it. Now it's worth underlining that John was pretty good at golf, a lot better than most people his age. But he realized being better than 90% of the competition wasn't going to be good enough to be a professional golfer. Far better to move to a field where he could be a real star. The choice was not actually between golf and economics. The choice was between being very good and being among the best. Economists have a term for this idea. It's called competitive advantage. Both companies and people should focus on areas where they have a competitive advantage over others. As John reshaped his dreams from the PGA tour to the faculty lounge, he started to encounter other ideas from economics that helped him understand why people failed to quit things they ought to quit.
One of the most important ideas, the fear of making a mistake. When it comes time to quit something and start something new, you're thinking, what am I going to lose? What am I giving up by moving from golf to economics? And that's something that we all grapple with, and it's called loss aversion. So loss aversion was an old psychological concept that I'm sure your listeners understand that losses hurt more than comparable gains. Now this kind of preference is found in markets. It's found in laboratories with students. It's found among CEOs. Now here we have to think about, I want to do my best to understand when loss averse tendencies are affecting my decision making. So I'm learning in the classroom that people have loss aversion, and I'm thinking, you know what, I really want to put loss aversion on the sidelines because I don't want it to
interrupt with my optimal decision making. And the other concept that I think is closely related to what we're talking about here is the concept of sunk costs.
Can you talk about that in the context of this decision? When I think about sunk costs, I want everyone to view this as these are costs or investments that you've made in the past that you can never recover. So in terms of the golf example, all of the hours that I spent as a 10 year old and a 12 year old and a 14 year old and a 16 year old, those have already been spent. Those are gone. And it's impossible to recover those. Now it's important that you do your best to ignore those. That's a hard ask, right? Because what I'm asking you to do is ignore regret. Because a lot of times when we invest, invest, invest in the past, if we have to change course, we have regret. And we say, I want to recognize those sunk costs because if I go ahead and change all of those things, I feel really bad. So it's a very important concept when it comes to moving activities or being mutable
that we really have to ignore as best we can these sunk costs. So one of the things that makes these decisions especially hard, and perhaps this is clearer in the example where you told me about your first marriage rather than the example of golf, which is that at the point at which you're setting one thing aside, it's often unclear what the next thing is going to be. Can you talk about this idea that many of us find the ambiguity of the next chapter, if we don't know what that next chapter is going to be, if we're not as fortunate as you in knowing that the next chapter is written and it's clear and it's front of us, that that ambiguity is a source of great unhappiness and discomfort?
Yeah, that's correct. So, we don't like uncertainty and we don't like making choices that lead us to sort of the world of the unknown. And when I think about going into the great unknown, you're exactly right. When you think about my marriage, I had been loving this woman since I was 16 years old. And all of a sudden, now I'm 45, 47 years old, saying, what is the great unknown? What is next? And I have no idea because I've never even thought about it. But the thought of going to the great unknown, the thought of going to an ambiguous situation or an uncertain situation, this is scary. And this causes us in many cases to stick
with what we have a lot more than we should. There's another concept from economics that's relevant to our discussion about the challenges involved with quitting, John. Can you explain the principle of diminishing returns with an example and tell me what it has to do with the phenomenon
of our aversion to quitting things? Diminishing returns is one of these foundational concepts in economics that the more we do something, every extra hour of something or every extra purchase or consumption of a candy bar, for example, there are diminishing returns. And what that means is, if you do it over and over again, eventually the returns become not very good through time. It's called the law of diminishing returns. And I was kind of met with this law when I think about some
of the work that I've done in the area of charitable fundraising. In the case of John's choice between golf and economics, he had to give up one thing to do another. But the law of diminishing returns presents a psychological challenge that is subtler. In this case, you are not giving up something. The thing you are doing still works and you should continue to do it. Just not as much as you were doing before. John discovered this in his work with a charitable organization called Smile Train.
And Smile Train is just a great organization that sends doctors overseas to the developing world to try to fix cleft pallets of these kids. So they send out roughly a million mailers every month to people to try to convince them to give to the cause. And I started to ask them, how often do you actually send these mailers? Because I had given to Smile Train and they started sending me a mailer every month. And they said, well, if there's a hot donor who has given and we think they want to keep giving, we want to give them a lot of chances to give. So we started doing research on this and we explored, should you send out a letter every month or should it be every quarter or every six months or once a year? And what we essentially found was they for sure were in the region of diminishing returns because if you send it every month, most of our fundraisers were actually doing worse than if they only sent once or twice a year.
Wow. In other words, you were upsetting the donors who were saying, why are you bothering
me with so many pitches? Exactly. You were really turning donors off and maybe you were acting too desperate or you were filling their inbox too often. And they said, look, I'm done. I'm going to give to somebody else. And that's really an example of diminishing returns. And really, what does this say that they should quit at maybe one or two a year?
So we've looked at a number of different factors that drive our reluctance to quit things, the problem with sunk costs and diminishing returns. But there's also, I think, something in our culture writ large that basically drives this. We hear so much about the virtues of persistence and perseverance. And especially in sports and business, we love to talk about the people who never give up. Maybe we don't use Vince Lombardi's words, but we sort of act as if
we do. Winners never quit, quitters never win, right? When I think about the quitting problem and the optimal quitting decision, it really is one part private and that's the individual. That's, do you have sunk cost? What about loss aversion? What about ambiguity? And that's on the individual. And we individually have to work on that to make better decisions. But the other part of the equation is very, very powerful. And that's exactly what does society tell us to do and what does society tell us not to do. And when you think about quitting society, at least around America and where I was raised, I was taught, if you quit, you're a loser. And look, it's not just me or my family.
You can type in inspirational quotes and quitting, type that into Google. And what you'll find is there are more posters that could fill every museum in the world with these different types of inspirational quotes. Now that tells me that society has taken a stance on quitting and that stance is it's one of the most repugnant
things you can do with your choices is to quit. And of course, the posters are not talking about the people who didn't give up but should have given up. So yes, Michael Jordan played through illness in the 1997 NBA final and he won. But lots of people who ignore what their bodies tell them find that their bodies fall apart on them. It's almost like there's a conspiracy of silence around
that unacknowledged cost. That's a great point because when you watch the Olympics or when you watch the World Cup in soccer or watch a sporting event or any kind of event, there is always that feel good story. That story about, you know what, this is a 42 year old who has been trying since they're 18 to make the Olympics. And they finally made it when they're 42. And then they bring on their kindergarten teacher, they bring on grandma, and they all say, you know, little Johnny, he never gave up and look at him now. He's in the Olympics. And look, those are great feel good stories. And I love those stories. But what about the hundreds of millions of people who have wasted their great skills and their opportunities who try and try and try and they keep digging down a dry hole and investing in something that will never work because they were
told you shall quit. Where's their story? When we come back, how to battle our psychological limitations with our psychological strengths. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Think of all the things in your life you should have quit years before you actually did. Now, think about things you should quit that are in your life today. Economist John List has spent time asking this question. Why don't you stop doing those things? John, you recently surveyed people who changed their jobs.
What reasons did
they give you for the change? I asked a simple question. Why did you quit? And reason number one was I lost the meaning of work. That's a good reason. Reason number two, I didn't get the promotion that I thought I deserved. Okay, that makes sense. Reason number three, I didn't get the pay raise I thought I deserved. Reason number four, I didn't get along with co-workers as well as I used to get along with them. All the way down to reason number 10, I didn't like my cubicle. Now, importantly, not one person said, you know what? Importantly, my opportunities got better, better.
And because my opportunities got better, I decided to leave my old job.
So when people were making a list or telling you the reasons they quit, what you're saying is they came up with reasons they didn't like their current job, as opposed to
saying there was another job that was even better than the one I have right now. That's exactly right. In each case, it was a push factor. And that's a fundamental mistake because you should be just as likely, if not more likely, to move from your job when your opportunity set gets better.
So economists have talked for a long time about opportunity costs. Could you just define the term
for me, John? It's when you decide to do something, what is the next best alternative that you would be doing with your time? And that next best alternative represents the opportunity cost of your time. Now, we can also think about that in terms of dollars. If I go to Starbucks and buy a latte for $4, I'm doing that because I like to consume the latte. But the opportunity cost is what is the next best alternative that I would spend my $4 and buy? That's just not how people think through problems. And if we can train ourselves to be better critical thinkers and understand what are you giving up when you make that choice, you will make much better choices, not only in your own private life, but also at work and also in your community.
You know, I'm thinking about that little-known story back in the 1990s. A young guy was working at a company called DE Shaw. And they asked him to work on internet stuff. And he found that the business that he was building was growing astronomically. And most people would have said, okay, this is my ticket to start him at this company. I have the inside track to run the place in a few years. But this kid didn't do that. He quit his high-paying job and launched a little startup selling books online. And it wasn't that working at a high-flying job for DE
Shaw was bad, but the opportunity costs of not founding Amazon were too high for Jeff Bezos. Yeah, that's a great story that Bezos decides, look, I could kill it here at Shaw. But if I continue to work at Shaw, I will have to forego starting up a bookshop. And that bookshop ends up
taking over the world. I mean, in some ways, John, one thing I'm taking away from a lot of this conversation is the importance of paying attention to the future more than paying attention to the past. When I'm thinking about the things that I could be doing with my time, when I think about, let's say I start eight projects, killing seven of those projects is painful because I have to think about all the time and effort that I put into those projects in the past. I might have sentimental or emotional attachments to those projects. And so getting rid of those projects is difficult. What I can't see of course, is what freeing up my time not working on those seven projects is going to get me in the future. And in some ways, I think what I'm hearing you say is to have more of a future orientation than a past orientation.
No, I think that's exactly right. And when you think about great inventors like Thomas Edison, so he has a famous quote that says, I haven't failed 10,000 times. I have successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work. To me, Edison is a poster child for the power of giving up. He's discarded these low voltage ideas in an effort to exactly as you're saying, what will happen next? What will happen around the corner? What will happen tomorrow? It's the forward looking. And what's going to happen next? And what am I giving up next by
making that choice? So John, you've made a powerful case in this conversation that we don't quit early or often enough, that there are many, many domains in our lives where we stick at things longer than we should, or we enter domains and stay in domains that we shouldn't be in in the first place. But are there times when we shouldn't quit? Times when pushing forward and
persevering is actually the right choice? No, absolutely. And I think it depends on when you quit or when you pivot, what will you be doing in that new activity? If you don't have a competitive advantage at it, or it doesn't have a market if you're a firm, then I don't want you quitting to do something that you're not good at, or that's kind of useless. So you should always consider when I quit, what am I going to do? And understand that there's uncertainty and understand that, it's the great unknown, but make sure that you're going to something that is real, make sure it's your competitive advantage, make sure you're going to enjoy it. And then you should go ahead and do it if that quitting leads you to do something that is much more prosperous, or it's much more satisfying for you than the activity that you're leaving.
So you're not saying that we should quit casually or thoughtlessly. You once carried out a study that suggests that if we are agonizing over whether to quit something, flipping a coin can tell us something important. Tell us about that experiment, Dajon.
Back in 2013, Steve Levitt and I asked participants who were on the fence about some decision in their life to flip a virtual coin. So these were people who were thinking about quitting their jobs, they were considering selling their house, some were even considering leaving a romantic relationship. So what we told them is, look, if you flip a heads on the coin, you're going to get a message that tells you to make the change. So you should quit the job or sell the house or leave the relationship. If you flip a tails, we advise them to keep the status quo. So now over the course of a year, we had over 20,000 people flip coins. Wow. And then we told them what to do. And to see how those decisions panned out, we emailed twice with each person two months after they toss a coin, and then six months later. Now here's what happens. Those who made the major change, like filing for a divorce or leaving their job or buying a new house, they were more likely to report being happier two months later, and even happier still six months later, compared to those who flipped a coin of tails and ended up keeping the status quo.
What is this telling you, John?
This is telling me that on the one hand, we are not using economic thinking to make a decision to either pivot or quit. We are thinking in a very narrow way. And secondly, it tells me that when we're really on the margin, and we're just grueling and grueling over what to do, it's likely you should make a change, taking account of all the biases that humans have, opportunity cost neglect, sunk cost bias, loss aversion, ambiguity aversion, society telling you you shouldn't quit. Every one of these is telling you don't quit. So my advice is if you've been on the margin for so long, even with all of these entities, social and private, telling you don't
quit, it's probably better if you just quit. John List is an economist at the University of Chicago. He's the author of The Voltage Effect, How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale. John, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Hey, thanks so much for having me, Shankar. If you have questions or thoughts about our conversation with John List, and are willing to have those questions shared with a larger Hidden Brain audience, please record a voice memo on your phone and email it to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org. 60 seconds is plenty. Please remember to include your name and a phone number where we can reach you. Again, email the question to us at ideas at hiddenbrain.org and use the subject line quitting. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Bridget McCarthy, Annie Murphy Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Correll, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, and Andrew Chadwick. Tara Boyle is our executive producer.
I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. For today's Unsung Hero, we bring you a story from our sister show, My Unsung Hero. The story comes from psychologist Bob Cialdini. When Bob was a senior in high school, he was really good at baseball. Good enough that one day, a scout showed up at his last game of the year and
handed him a piece of paper. It was a contract and offered to play in the minor leagues. I was a center fielder and I wanted all my life, I wanted to be Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays, the big center fielders at the time. And his pen wouldn't work. So he said, well, I've got another one in the car. So we walked to the car and along the way, he said to me, so tell me something. Are you any good at school? I said, yes, I am. He said, good enough to get into college. Yes, I am good enough to finish college. Yes. Do you like it?
Do you like thinking about academic things? I love it. I love it. And he put the contract away and he said, go to school, kid, because most likely you won't get to the majors. But what you've told me is that you're good at something you really like. That should be where you go. The truth is he was right. I mean, I was pretty good, but I couldn't hit a slider, a good slider. And I was going to be seeing a lot more good sliders if I went into professional baseball. And he, I think, understood that and gave me advice. I've always been thankful for him for providing to me. Don't just go where your dream is.
Go where your dream is that you're good at, where you have the skills to realize the dream.
He did something that was generous and and I will always be indebted to him. Bob headed after college instead of the minor leagues. He went on to become an author and well-known psychology researcher at Arizona State University. His work was recently featured on Hidden Brain in two episodes about the science of influence. They're titled Persuasion Part One and Persuasion Part Two. We'd love to hear about your own unsung hero. Use your phone to record your story and email it to us at myunsunghero at hiddenbrain.org. That's myunsunghero at hiddenbrain.org. All this month we're exploring different dimensions of what it means to be successful. We would love for you to listen to the entire series and share it with your friends. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.
