Despite the way the terms ‘grit’ and ‘quit’ have been pitted against each other, they are actually two sides of the exact same decision. Anytime that you are deciding whether to quit, you are obviously simultaneously deciding whether to stick, and vice versa.

In other words, you can’t decide one thing without deciding the other.

Mountain climbers offer a good way to think about the grit-quit decision: Grit is what gets you up the mountain, but quit is what tells you when to come down. In fact, it is the option to turn around that allows you to make the decision to climb the mountain in the first place.

Just imagine if any decision you made was last and final. Whatever you decide, you would have to stick with it for the rest of your life. Think of how certain you would have to be before you could ever make a choice to start anything. Imagine if you had to marry the first person you ever went on a date with.

Having no option to change course or change your mind would be disastrous in a landscape that itself is changing, where mountains can become molehills, and molehills can become mountains. If the mountain you’ve been scaling turns out to be a glacier that’s starting to melt beneath you, you want to climb down it before you’re washed away.

Why quitting is a skill we all need to get better at