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You're listening to Life Kit from NPR.
Hey, it's Mariel.
Raise your hand if you've heard one of these sayings.
Don't be a quitter.
Winners never quit and quitters never win.
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.
There's all this stuff around quitting that makes it seem cowardly.
This is Annie Duke, a cognitive psychologist, a decision strategist, and a former professional poker player.
She wrote a book called Quit, and she says we tend to think about quitting as a failure.
Even though it's not failure, if you're doing it in a situation where you ought to be walking away, that's a success.
Because you've stopped spinning your wheels or wasting your time,
and you get to go do other things that you'll enjoy more or that bring more value to your life.
But how do you know when it's one of those situations, when it is time to walk away?
Or as Angela Duckworth puts it, when to grit and when to quit.
Angela is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania.
She pioneered academic research on grit,