You’ve heard the old adage – quitters never win. According to Seth Godin, author of The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick), those old sayings are dead wrong. Indeed, Mr. Godin claims that successful are those who use quitting as a targeted tactic. So, how does quitting make you successful?

Whenever you start a career, project, hobby, etc. initially, you’ll always do well but after a certain point you’ll hit a dead end and things will either stay the same or get worse – this is ‘the dip’. Mr. Godin thinks that the worse thing you can do in the dip is quit. Successful people are those who stick through the dip and come out on the other end with something to show for it. Equally, successful people are those who visualize the dip even before they start the project and decide against commencing the endeavor. Why? Because they have seen the dip and realized that they wouldn’t be willing to suffer so much for so long. For example, imagine trying to start playing golf and you want to get pretty good to compete at your local country club. Mr. Godin contends that you should only commence this hobby if you are willing to go through the inevitable hours and weeks you’ll have to spend on practicing and improving your technique to get where you want to be. Otherwise, don’t bother with it. The worse thing you can do is start playing golf, and then quit because you’ll have wasted your time and effort. I’m not talking about playing golf for fun here; I’m talking about someone who really wants to become a good club player.

This sounds like common sense. And it is. But Mr. Godin describes this phenomenon very concisely in both graphical and visual form. ‘The Dip’ graphically represents the experience of a new endeavor quite accurately. Mr. Godin also uses other graphical forms to represent other types of experiences such as ‘the cul-de-sac’ (a dead end endeavor) or ‘the cliff’ (an endeavor that will come back to haunt you – think of smoking). These concepts allow a productive, goal-oriented approach to anything. Simply, decide the point at which you’ll quit before you even start. Mr Godin uses the example of good marathon runners; they don’t quit when they feel tired because they’ve already resolved their quitting point before. This earlier resolution allows them to not make panicked decisions in the heat of the moment.

Mr. Godin conceptual framework builds of earlier ideas. Robert Greene, in the Concise 48 Laws of Power,talks about how the concentration of forces as crucial to obtaining power. This concentration comes from quitting all those dead end projects, or those projects which you usually leave halfway through.

And that’s just the tip.