Audio Software icon An illustration of a 3. Software Images icon An illustration of two photographs. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. The dip : a little book that teaches you when to quit and when to stick Item Preview. EMBED for wordpress. Want more? Advanced embedding details, examples, and help!
Success in business. Only the ones who push harder and manage to overcome the dip can accomplish their goals. Here are 3 lessons I learned about persistence, excellence , and giving up at the right time:.
Knowing the dip before you find yourself in it will help you get through. Learn how to withstand this time of struggle or rather strategically quit! If you want to save this summary for later, download the free PDF and read it whenever you want. Download PDF. Whatever endeavor you undertake, small and big struggles are waiting for you hidden behind the initial excitement. Unfortunately, facing them is the only way to realize yourself.
To overcome the dip, you need to embrace increasingly hard challenges. Think of your personal development as a muscle: no pain, no gain. Emerging from the dip also implies perseverance. When you start to build a new business, be prepared to struggle for years. Today people wait for new products to be reviewed as high-quality ones before spending their precious money on them.
Hence even if you created the most fabulous product, you can be required to spend a very long time in the Dip of getting enough customers. They just want him to provide a great service. Specializing is essential for you to withstand the dips you may face in your life! According to the International Ice Cream Association, vanilla is the most popular ice cream flavor and chocolate is the second. This means being the very best at what you do will bring you much higher profits than being second or one of the best.
Our society likes winners. If you are in a new place and ask locals for a typical restaurant, they will probably send you to the most famous one in town. As a result, the majority of tourists are likely to eat in the very same place. They can also charge higher prices.
Smart quitting is a conscious decision based on what it takes to invest further to emerge from the dip — a choice among more options available to you. Sometimes quitting is the wisest thing to do. In many cases, you only have two options: being exceptional or quitting. If you realize you are significantly overinvesting time and money to be the first in your market, you should consider shifting from your niche to another one.
If you are thinking of quitting, here are 3 questions you should ask yourself:. Good quitters state in advance when to quit by setting goals and deadlines. Achievement comes from quitting something to free up time and energy for what we consider more effective. Four Minute Books participates in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising commissions by linking to Amazon.
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Those thirty-seven people are essentially guaranteed a job for life after they finish their year with the Court. Clerks go on to become partners, judges, and senators. There are two things worth noting here. And the second thing? Instead, they quit in their quest to be the best in the world because the cost just seemed too high. This is a very short book about a very important topic: quitting. Sometimes, though, quitting is exactly the wrong thing to do.
In addition to being smart and focused and incredibly hardworking, Hannah Smith is also a quitter. Before we start on the quitting, though, you probably need to be sold on why being the best in the world matters so much. We reward the product or the song or the organization or the employee that is number one. Winners win big because the marketplace loves a winner. After all, it came in fourth. The short, big, profitable head.
Why screw around if you get only one chance? When you visit a new town, are you the sort of person who wants to visit a typical restaurant, or do you ask the concierge for the best place? With limited time or opportunity to experiment, we intentionally narrow our choices to those at the top. Everyone does. As a result, the rewards for being first are enormous.
The Real Reason Number One Matters The second reason there are such tremendous benefits to being number one is a little more subtle.
Scarcity makes being at the top worth something. There is no top for bottled water. Champagne is a different story. Where does the scarcity come from? It comes from the hurdles that the markets and our society set up. The system depends on it.
Best as in: best for them, right now, based on what they believe and what they know. And in the world as in: their world, the world they have access to. That, and she has to be in my town and have a slot open. So world is a pretty flexible term. The mass market is dying. There is no longer one best song or one best kind of coffee.
Now there are a million micromarkets, but each micromarket still has a best. And being the best in that world is the place to be. Best is subjective. I the consumer get to decide, not you. World is selfish. Be the best in my world and you have me, at a premium, right now. The world is getting larger because I can now look everywhere when I want to find something or someone. That means that the amount of variety is staggering, and it means I can define my world to be exactly what I have an interest in—and find my preferences anywhere on the planet.
At the same time, the world is getting smaller because the categories are getting more specialized. I can now find the best gluten-free bialys available by overnight shipping. I can find the best risk-management software for my industry, right now, online.
I can find the best clothing-optional resort in North America with six clicks of a mouse. More places to win, and the stakes are higher, too. Andy Warhol was the best in the world.
So is the Sripraphai Thai restaurant in Queens. So is my editor. So are you, if you want to be. And in just about every market, the number of choices is approaching infinity. Faced with infinity, people panic. Faced with an infinite number of choices, many people pick the market leader. Best- selling books still outsell backlist titles. Web sites highlighted on Digg still get a hundred times as much traffic as ordinary sites.
The number of job seekers is approaching infinity. So is the number of professional services firms, lawyers, manicure shops, coffee bars, and brands of soap. Better to be the best. Junk mail with a misspelled name. Salespeople who are eager to open an account, but never follow up. People settle. They settle for less than they are capable of. Organizations settle too. For good enough instead of best in the world. The reason that big companies almost always fail when they try to enter new markets is their willingness to compromise.
They figure that because they are big and powerful, they can settle, do less, stop improving something before it is truly remarkable. They compromise to avoid offending other divisions or to minimize their exposure.
So they fail. The Biggest Mistake They Made in School Just about everything you learned in school about life is wrong, but the wrongest thing might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success. Boy, was he in trouble. Fast-forward a few decades from those school days, and think about the decisions you make today—about which doctor to pick, which restaurant to visit, or which accountant to hire.
How often do you hope that your accountant is a safe driver and a decent golfer? In a free market, we reward the exceptional. In school, we tell kids that once something gets too hard, move on and focus on the next thing. The low-hanging fruit is there to be taken; no sense wasting time climbing the tree.
The people who skip the hard questions are in the majority, but they are not in demand. More often than not, prospects choose someone else—their competition.
It was called The Magic of Thinking Big. What I do remember is that in one quick moment, it changed the way I thought about success. My hope is that the next page or two might do the same for you.
I want to change the way you think about success and quitting. Most people will tell you that you need to persevere—to try harder, put in more hours, get more training, and work hard.
But if all you need to do to succeed is not quit, then why do organizations less motivated than yours succeed? Why do individuals less talented than you win? It involves understanding the architecture of quitting, and, believe it or not, it means quitting a lot more than you do now. Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations.
Reactive quitting and serial quitting are the bane of those that strive and fail to get what they want. And most people do just that. There are two curves that define almost any type of situation facing you as you try to accomplish something. A couple of minor curves cover the rest. Understanding the different types of situations that lead you to quit—or that should cause you to quit—is the first step toward getting what you want.
Over the next few days and weeks, the rapid learning you experience keeps you going. And then the Dip happens. The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery. The Dip is the combination of bureaucracy and busywork you must deal with in order to get certified in scuba diving. The Dip is the set of artificial screens set up to keep people like you out.
Organic chemistry is the killer class, the screen that separates the doctors from the psychologists. At trade shows, you see dozens of companies trying to break into an industry. The same thing happens to people who dream of the untold riches and power that accrue to the CEO of a Fortune company. Private jets, fancy country clubs, unchecked decision-making power.
For a quarter of a century, he needed to suck it up, keep his head down, and do what he was told. He needed to hit his numbers, work longer hours than everyone else, and kiss up to his boss of the moment. Day in and day out, year after year. No, they lean into the Dip. They push harder, changing the rules as they go. It just is. Two big curves a bonus, the Cliff, follows. Stick with the Dips that are likely to pan out, and quit the Cul-de-Sacs to focus your resources.
Because smoking is designed to be almost impossible to quit, the longer you do it, the better it feels to continue smoking. The pain of quitting just gets bigger and bigger over time. Neither is making it as a singer or building a long-term relationship with someone you care about. Most of the time, the other two curves are in force. The Dip creates scarcity; scarcity creates value. Not soon, but right now. The biggest obstacle to success in life, as far as I can tell, is our inability to quit these curves soon enough.
Or is it just easier not to rock the boat, to hang in there, to avoid the short-term hassle of changing paths? Are you overinvesting really significantly overinvesting time and money so that you have a much greater chance of dominating a market?
The people who set out to make it through the Dip—the people who invest the time and the energy and the effort to power through the Dip—those are the ones who become the best in the world. For whatever reason, they refuse to abandon the quest and they push through the Dip all the way to the next level. Snowboarding is a hip sport. So why are there so few snowboarders? Because learning the basic skills constitutes a painful Dip.
The brave thing to do is to tough it out and end up on the other side—getting all the benefits that come from scarcity. A few people will choose to do the brave thing and end up the best in the world. Both are fine choices.
Because he knew that in open country, he and Sundance would never have a shot at escape. The harder it got, the better it was for Butch. Hey, it worked in the movie. Your marketplace is competitive, filled with people overcoming challenges every day. In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition. Because it distracts management attention. It sucks resources and capital and focus and energy.
Jack quit the dead ends. By doing so, he freed resources to get his other businesses through the Dip. The Thing About the Wind I can tell you that windsurfing is very easy—except for the wind. The wind makes it tricky, of course. What messes the whole plan up is the fact that the wind is unpredictable.
In fact, every single function of an organization has a wind problem. Accounting would be easy if every incoming report were accurate and on time.
Marketing would be easy if every prospect and customer thought the way you do. The reason people bother to go windsurfing is that the challenge makes it interesting. The driving force that gets people to pay a specialist is that their disease is unpredictable or hard to diagnose. The Dip is your very best friend. You get what you deserve when you embrace the Dip and treat it like the opportunity that it really is. This leads to record labels with thousands of artists instead of focused promotion for just a few.
It leads to job seekers who can demonstrate competency at a dozen tasks instead of mastery of just one. Hardworking, motivated people find diversification a natural outlet for their energy and drive. Diversification feels like the right thing to do. Enter a new market, apply for a job in a new area, start a new sport. Who knows?
This might just be the one. And yet the real success goes to those who obsess. The focus that leads you through the Dip to the other side is rewarded by a marketplace in search of the best in the world. A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy.
Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner. Quitting is difficult. At least not at this. What a waste. The very scarcity of this attribute makes it attractive. Weight training is a fascinating science.
Basically, you do a minute or two of work for no reason other than to tire out your muscle so that the last few seconds of work will cause that muscle to grow. Like most people, all day long, every day, you use your muscles. Universe because you quit using your muscles before you reach the moment where the stress causes them to start growing.
People who train successfully pay their dues for the first minute or two and then get all the benefits at the very end. Unsuccessful trainers pay exactly the same dues but stop a few seconds too early. The challenge is simple: Quitting when you hit the Dip is a bad idea. Superstar Thinking Superstars get what they want because they have unique skills.
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