[orangewarp]

I'll have to check out some of these books personally but I'm curious if anyone has read the "The Dip: A little book that teaches you when to quit." I'm interested if someone can give a little more detail as to how the author explains and turns into a procedure, the process of understanding and the actions of when to quit.

Two quotes the site claims are, "If you can't be the best in your class, you should quit" and "Quitting does not make you a failure, you quit to avoid failure." It struck me as a little dangerous and possible that if this is the kind of understanding that results from the book, people might skip out too quickly - something that I see in education too often when persistence and effort could have done wonders. In my opinion, it is very important to know when to ADMIT failure (as opposed to avoid failure) and learn from it. Surely it's also good advice that at some points in our lives we should know when to cut our losses and move on to the next thing. Does this book do this in a deep and objective way?

There is a lot of evidence that people are pretty poor at assessing themselves. Second, the idea of failure avoidance is a common trait of people with fixed implicit theories of self and low effort-belief (traits correlated with lower performances, at least on tasks in the domain of education.) Third, people are really good at justifying their actions to preserve their self concepts. Ingredients that unless accounted for, seem like they could be dream killers with a slight push called "go ahead, quit."

Now, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt that the actual book probably goes much more in depth as to when and how to make this sort of assessment but I thought I'd bring it up. Your thoughts?

[karlkrantz]

You're right that it is dangerous advice if used as an excuse. One of the points that Seth Godin makes—that I didn't have space to go into in that short writeup—is that it's a good habit to determine what would make you quit something before you even start, this way you never quit because the short term pain is too great. This also helps prevent you from getting blinded by pride and sticking with something too long (He uses the example of Nixon and the Vietnam war in the book).

I think the book does look at it in a objectified way, and in the signature Seth Godin way that is both simple and deep for his fans, and too obvious to his critics.

Note that The Dip is actually a super short book, maybe 75-80 pages. To veer off topic a bit I think this in itself is interesting, and a trend I'd like to see more of. Not just because people are busier than ever, but because publishers push writers to "fill out" so many business books when the core point could be made in less than 100 pages. Some ideas are complex and require 1000 pages, many could be done justice in a few chapters.