Reflection Title: The Ants Go Marching One By One…Except When They Don’t!
Book – Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away by Annie Duke (Part 1 of 2)
Book Description:
In Quit, Duke teaches you how to get good at quitting. Drawing on stories from elite athletes like Mount Everest climbers, founders of leading companies like Stewart Butterfield, the CEO of Slack, and top entertainers like Dave Chappelle, Duke explains why quitting is integral to success, as well as strategies for determining when to hold em, and when to fold em, that will save you time, energy, and money. You’ll learn:
How the paradox of quitting influences decision making: If you quit on time, you will feel you quit early. What forces work against good quitting behavior, such as escalation commitment, desire for certainty, and status quo bias. How to think in expected value in order to make better decisions, as well as other best practices, such as increasing flexibility in goal-setting, establishing “quitting contracts,” anticipating optionality, and conducting premortems and backcasts
Reflection:
Well done Annie Duke…well done! I loved every minute of this one and learned a TON about the power of quitting.
As we officially pass mile marker 25 today on our year of magical learning marathon, I’m sometimes blown away at how far we’ve come, how much we’ve learned, and how I can’t wait to share this journey with as many people as I can in the future. This has been a truly special and once in a lifetime adventure of epic proportions.
This journey will end soon, within the next few weeks if all continues on according to plan, but I’m not worried about it. Even if you told me this journey had to stop today for whatever reason, I’d be more than happy to quit even though we are so close to the finish line. That is because I know that reflection 365 isn’t the finish line of YOML at all. I can guarantee you this, YOML will live on in some capacity until the last day that I’m privileged enough to walk this Earth. It may not look the same, but it will still be there, I can promise you that. That is because YOML isn’t a thing and never was, YOML is a manifestation of bringing my abstract values of learning, reflection, challenging myself, balance, give more than I take, don’t do it alone, humility, integrity, and enduring to life.
On this particular journey, bringing my values to life decided to take on the shape of this 365-book/reflection adventure that you have been consuming for almost a year. I have zero idea of what new shape or form it will take once we cross the tape at reflection 365, but I can guarantee you the underlying values that power the next phase will remain the same.
Emilia and I will keep exploring our values until the next great adventure on our life’s purpose together presents itself. After all, that is how YOML began in the first place. That is a story of its own that I wanted to take a second to share as it is relevant to something I learned from Annie Duke in Quit.
Let’s take a voyage back to September of 2021, the month when YOML as you know it was born.
Ever since Emilia and I rediscovered each other and made the commitment that we would spend the rest of lives together doing the things we love the most together, our lives have been filled with endless new ideas, questions, and seemingly new paths to explore together. It is a blast, but it can also be overwhelming sometimes as the more options that are presented to our curious spirits, the harder it becomes to decide what to do.
We don’t want to stifle our creativity, but at the same time, we don’t have the capacity to do everything and make the commitment necessary to keep pushing forward toward our mission.
What to do? Well, our solution has been this thing we do called our Monthly Challenge.
Each month, we pick something new to try out for 30 days and set a goal to build a habit around it as best we can. There is no stress or pressure to perform. Just try it and see what happens. If it sticks…it sticks. If it doesn’t…it doesn’t. It is that simple.
That is exactly how YOML began, as a monthly challenge. It began like always where I brought a hairbrained idea to talk about with my ClubAny co-founder Trieu on one of our nightly connects. We talked about it, and I convinced myself to try it for my September 2021 monthly challenge. Fast forward to October 1st and I found myself with 25 book reflections written off of things I had read over the past year and was absolutely loving it. It was effortless, and I was having a great time with Emilia. So, it was an easy decision to just keep going…and now we are at 349 and counting and still having a blast.
So, what does all this have to do with a book about quitting, you ask? The answer is found in something new that I learned about Ants, of all things, from Quit. When we think of ants, we think about ants marching in order on a collective mission. They certainly do this, but there are a few ants in the crew that don’t. They are designated as exploring ants and their job is to find new tracks for the crew to follow should the food source the rest of the team is working on runs dry.
Sound familiar? That is exactly what Emilia and I are accidentally doing each month I think with these challenges.
Why I have no idea what comes next after YOML ends today, I can promise you that Emilia and I will keep exploring our values until we find the next crazy idea that sticks and we’ll feed off that one as long as we can until we can’t…then we’ll do it all over again. The food we crave is our values, not some specific dish. I’m confident that food source will always magically appear as long as we are willing to keep exploring.
Question: How are you actively incorporating exploration in your life to discover your next steps?
Links:
What is The Year of Magical Learning? - An Introduction
YOML Podcast Discussion - Coming Soon
YOML Bookstore - Quit by Annie Duke
Comments