Question

You've been at it for a while now, whatever the 'it' is - a job, an academic pursuit, a business start-up, a relationship, a charitable endeavour, a military career, a sport. Maybe it's a dream project you've been working on for so long you can't even remember what got you all dreamy in the first place. In your most honest moments, it's easy to see that things aren't working out. So why haven't you quit?

At least three forces bias us against quitting. The first is a lifetime of being told by society that quitting is a

sign of failure.

The second is the notion of sunk costs. This is pretty much what it sounds like: the time or money or sweat equity you've already spent on a project. It is tempting to believe that once you're invested heavily in something, it is counterproductive to quit. This is known as the sunk-cost fallacy or, as the biologist Richard Dawkins called it, the Concorde fallacy, after the supersonic airplane. Its two patrons, the British and French governments, suspected the Concorde was not economically viable but had spent too many billions on it already to stop. In simpler times, this was known as throwing good money after bad - but money is hardly the only resource that people toss into the sunk-cost trap. Think about all the time, brainpower and social or political capital you continued to spend on some commitment only because you didn't like the idea of quitting.
The third force that keeps people from quitting is a tendency to focus on concrete costs and pay too little attention to opportunity cost. This is the notion that for every dollar or hour or brain cell you spend on one thing, you surrender the opportunity to spend it elsewhere. Concrete costs are usually easy to calculate, but opportunity cost is harder. If you want to go back to college to get an MBA, you know it'll cost two years' time and $80,000 - but what might you have done with that time and money had you not been in college? Or let's say you've been a competitive runner for years and it's still a big part of your identity - but what else might you accomplish if you weren't slamming your joints into the pavement twenty hours a week? Might you do something that makes your life, or others lives, more fulfilling, more productive, more exciting? Perhaps. If only you weren't so worried about the sunk costs. If only you could quit.

Let's be clear: we are not suggesting you quit everything in order to do nothing to spend all day on the couch in your underwear, eating nachos and watching TV. But if you're stuck in a project or relationship or mind-set that isn't working, and if the opportunity cost seems to outweigh the sunk cost, it might be a good idea to quit.


What, according to this passage, is not one of the forces

that keep us from quitting?

O Social pressure

O The fear of losing opportunities

Having invested too much into something

O Not being aware of what we might miss out on​

Answer 1

Answer:

I thought the fear of losing opportunities