Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. We've been making Frekenomics Radio for a while now, and

there are two themes we have come back to again and again. The first is the value of persistence,

of staying the course, not giving up. Our friend Angela Duckworth, a research psychologist at

the University of Pennsylvania, wrote a book about this. It's called Grit, the power of passion

and perseverance. Here she is on our sister podcast, No Stupid Questions. I think the reason why

there are all these aphorisms about not giving up, and maybe why so much of my research has focused

on the psychology of staying the course, is that sometimes the road not taken, the track that you

want to switch to, is appealing not because it is objectively better, but because it's objectively

easier just in the short run. In other words, we give up because we're lazy, or maybe impatient,

or intimidated, or we're scared to fail. That makes sense, doesn't it? Duckworth is saying we

might be better off by learning to tough it out. But the other theme we have often explored is

pretty much the opposite of Grit. Back in 2011, we made an episode called The Upside of Quitting.

Here's my Freakonomics friend and co-author, Steve Levitt, more recently.

There is a compliment to be called a quitter precisely because we live in a world where so many

forces push us to persist far too long at failing endeavors. Now, Levitt is an economist, not a

psychologist, and his ideas about quitting come from basic economic concepts. One of them is called

Opportunity Cost. That's the idea that every dollar or hour or brain cell you spend doing one thing

is a dollar, an hour, or brain cell you can't spend on some other opportunity.

There is another idea called the Sunk Cost Fallacy. A Sunk Cost is a time or money or effort

you've already spent. The fallacy is the belief that since you've already spent all those

resources, you would be foolish to quit. But in reality, this is what economists argue, at least,

those Sunk Costs are a distraction. And if what you're doing isn't likely to work out,

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