Disappointment

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  A poker table, it turns out, is a very good place to learn about the upside of quitting. Optimal quitting might be the most important skill separating great players from amateurs. In fact, without the option to abandon a hand, poker would be much more like baccarat, a game of no skill because there are no new decisions you get to make once the cards are dealt. Top poker players are better at quitting than amateurs in a variety of ways. The most obvious is that they know when to fold ’em. Deciding which hands are worth playing and which hands are not is the first and most consequential choice a player makes. And pros are just better at that choice, playing a mere 15% to 25% of the two-card starting combinations they are dealt in Texas Hold’em. Compare that to an amateur, who will stick with their starting cards over half the time. In the battle of whether to hold ’em or fold ’em, amateurs usually hold ’em. Professionals usually fold ’em. This may be, in part, because in the choice between holding ’em and folding ’em, only holding ’em lets you know for sure that you never miss out on raking in a pot that you might have won if you had just stayed in the hand till the last card. There’s an old saying in poker that goes “Any two cards can win,” meaning that if you stick with your hand, there is always some possibility, no matter how slim, that even a terrible hand can triumph. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go on to say, “. . . but not enough of the time for it to be profitable.” I remember many, many nights at a poker table when a player sitting next to me would nudge me after a hand to let me know that the cards they folded would have won the pot. It would occasionally get ridiculous, like when they had folded a seven-deuce at the beginning of the hand (the mathematically worst two-card starting combination you can be dealt, so it’s a no-brainer to fold) and the five community cards would end up including seven-deuce-deuce. They would invariably lean over and groan, “I folded seven-deuce. I would have made a full house!” I’d tell them, “There’s a way to avoid that.” “How?” “Just play every hand all the way to the last card.” That advice might have been absurd, but I was making the point that a necessary part of succeeding in poker is to fold some hands that might have won. To be good at the game you just have to learn to live with that. Playing every hand you are dealt is an easy and fast way to go broke since you would be playing too many hands that aren’t profitable in the long run. That would also make poker more like baccarat, taking out a key element of skill, the option to fold.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  We tend to think only about one side of the human response to adversity: the ones who go for it. The people who continued up the mountain become the heroes of the story, tragic or otherwise. They’re the ones who catch our attention, the ones who persevered, despite not having adhered to the turnaround time. The story of the climbers who turned around on summit day was out there for the telling, but apparently not for the remembering. There is no doubt that quitting is an important decision-making skill. Getting the decision right is sometimes a matter of life or death. That was the case on Everest. But even in this life-or-death situation, we don’t seem to remember the quitters at all. The problem with this is, of course, that we learn to get better at things from experience, either our own experience or by watching others. And our ability to learn from experience can only be as good as our memory of those experiences. This is no less true for decisions about quitting. How can we learn if we don’t even see the quitters? Worse yet, how are we supposed to learn if, when we do see them, we view them negatively, as people not worthy of our admiration, as cowards or poltroons? Admittedly, “poltroon” is an obscure word now, but it’s a synonym for quitter that used to be quite popular, sufficiently nasty that if you called someone a poltroon, they were within their rights to challenge you to a duel. When Charles Dickinson called Andrew Jackson a coward and a poltroon in a local newspaper in 1806, Jackson challenged Dickinson to a duel, killed him, and it didn’t stop Jackson from becoming president in 1829. If calling someone a quitter is grounds to shoot them, how can we expect people to appreciate how important it is to become skilled at walking away? Quitting Is a Decision-Making Tool Despite the way grit and quit have been pitted against each other, they are actually two sides of the exact same decision. Anytime that you are deciding whether to quit, you are obviously simultaneously deciding whether to stick, and vice versa. In other words, you can’t decide one thing without deciding the other.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  287Lecture 29—Secularism and the Death of God THE QUIET REVOLUTION õQuebec offers an extreme story. Quebeckers went from being the most Christian society in the West to arguably the most irreligious in the space of about a decade. The 1960 election there ushered in a period known as the Quiet Revolution. The government took the place of the Catholic Church in social welfare, and French-Canadian nationalism took the place of Christianity as a source of identity. õIn 1960, Quebec voters elected a Liberal Party government led by Premier Jean Lesage. He ushered in a number of big changes, including the expansion of the public welfare system, new hospital insurance benefits, and the creation of an education ministry to take over control of the schools from the church. His party also brought the nationalization of major industries, like the electric companies. By the mid- 1960s, the role of Catholic institutions in everyday life was a shadow of what it had been. õMany progressive Catholics were glad about this. They believed that Catholic leaders in the province were stuck in the past and preventing Quebeckers from getting ahead and learning about the wider world. õMany young Catholic intellectuals were bent on modernizing Quebec Catholicism for the 20 th century. They urged young Quebeckers to question the values of their parents’ generation and to think internationally. Essentially, they posited that you don’t have to be Catholic in order to be a good French-Canadian. By the year 2000, attendance at Mass in Quebec would decline to 15 percent. õYet humans seem to have a limited tolerance for individualism; even when they shake off the demands of a communal religion, many want some group to belong to. This is important, because it helps us

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Self-Help Best Seller When it started, I believed I was special. It was a terrible thing to discover that I was common, that everything that happened to me—a crystalline, devastating landscape I navigated in my bare feet—was detailed in books and reports, in statistics. It was terrible because I wanted to believe that my love was unique and my pain was unique, as all of us do. (“Having now described the fiasco with the Professor at length,” Terry Castle writes, “I confess, I feel on the one hand a bit embarrassed by its sheer triteness: my own sitting-duckness, my seducer’s casebook callousness.”) But then I opened book after book about lesbian abuse and saw pseudonymed women regurgitating everything that happened to me. There is a pie chart that encompasses those years of my life. A pie chart! The first book about lesbian abuse was published the year I was born. Not the most ancient scholarship in the world, but old enough. Why did no one tell me? But who would have told me? I knew so few queer people, and most of them were my age, still figuring things out themselves. I imagine that, one day, I will invite young queers over for tea and cheese platters and advice, and I will be able to tell them: you can be hurt by people who look just like you. Not only can it happen, it probably will, because the world is full of hurt people who hurt people. Even if the dominant culture considers you an anomaly, that doesn’t mean you can’t be common, common as fucking dirt.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  the monkey first, you naturally reduce the debris you accumulate solving for something that’s, in reality, already solved. We can see this illusion of progress that pedestal-building creates with the California bullet train. We’ve built countless miles of train tracks over flat land everywhere. They essentially figured that out over 150 years ago, making railroad companies among the most profitable in the world in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This is infrastructure that we already know we can build. That means that any track you build on the interior of the line is going to be a pedestal. And yet the first piece of track they approved in 2010 was on flat land between Madera and Fresno. Astro Teller also understands a subtler but no less important point, that we have a tendency, when we butt up against a monkey that is proving difficult to solve, to turn our attention to building pedestals rather than giving up. We prefer that illusion of progress to having to quit and admit defeat. Here again, this is on full display with the California bullet train. Having butted up against the big monkeys of the Pacheco Pass and the Tehachapi Mountains, the Authority turned to building two more pedestals, the track connecting Bakersfield to Merced and, if they finish that, the track connecting San Francisco to Silicon Valley approved by Governor Newsom in 2019. Had the decision-makers in California approached the project’s problems as X does, using monkeys and pedestals, they may have shut down that project as quickly as X shut down the hyperloop. Instead, their katamari keeps growing, making the bullet train harder and harder to abandon. Butting up against a monkey that you can’t solve and turning to pedestal- building is a disaster on two fronts. Not only are you continuing to pour resources into something after the world is giving you signals that you won’t succeed, but those are resources you could be devoting to something better. For every dollar the Authority continues to sink into the bullet train, that’s a dollar not available for other big ideas with a greater likelihood of benefiting the taxpayers of California. Monkeys and pedestals boils down to some very good advice: Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  They opened a new account, a second attempt to summit Everest, and anything short of reaching that summit would mean failing yet again. Hall felt compelled to let Hansen reach the finish line this time, and so he, otherwise regarded as an extremely methodical guide and expedition leader, waited two hours at the summit for Hansen to arrive, long after the turnaround time he set for his clients. Of course, that ended in tragedy for both of them. Progress along the way should count for something, but we discard it because goals are pass-fail, all-or-nothing, yes-or-no. There’s no partial credit given. Altogether, the pass-fail nature of goals can impede progress, cause escalation of commitment, and stop us from considering the progress we make along the way as a success. The shame in all this is that those finish lines are often arbitrary. If you complete 5 kilometers in the context of a 5K, you’ve succeeded. But if that’s as far as you run in the context of a half-marathon, that’s a failure. If you run 13.1 miles in the context of a half-marathon, that’s a success, but in the context of a full marathon, you have failed. And successfully running 26.2 miles becomes a failure if you were attempting an ultramarathon. To understand why Sasha Cohen endured three years of misery after the 2006 Olympics, we just need to think about the pass-fail nature of goals. Her finish line, going into the 2006 Olympics as the favorite, was to win a gold medal. She fell short, both literally and figuratively, when she stumbled in her long program and had to settle for silver. Second best in the world counts for little when the goal is to be first. And so she continued to skate unhappily in shows, sticking around to try once more in 2010 to reach the finish line. When she finished two places short of making the 2010 Olympic team and finally aged out, that forced her to close that mental account. She felt free, relieved of the burden that the pass-fail nature of goals imposes. Goals work, but sometimes they work to the point where they make us ignore clear signs that the goal is not worth continuing to pursue. When a goal is all-or-nothing, your choices are essentially not to start or stick to the goal no matter what. This is part of what creates the paradox of quitting. The beauty of having the option to quit is that it makes it easier for us to make decisions under uncertainty. Whenever we make a decision, whether it’s starting a race, or starting up a mountain, or starting a business, or starting a relationship, we’re making that decision with incomplete information in a world that’s stochastic. We’re under the influence of luck. The world can change. We can change.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  203Lecture 21—The Church’s Encounter with Modern Learning GERMAN HAPPENINGS õThe German theologian David Friedrich Strauss became famous when he published a book called The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined. It came out in 1835 and was met with extremely harsh reviews. õStrauss had said that the rationalists and traditional Christians who believed in the role of the supernatural both got Jesus wrong. The Gospels were not accounts of miracles, nor were they stories of natural events that looked like miracles. In essence, the Jesus stories were myths. õThese events did not really happen at all; per Strauss, they tell us more about the worldview of the apostles than about Jesus himself. The authors of the Gospels used imagery and tropes from the Jewish tradition to make an argument about who they believed Jesus to be— images like God feeding the Israelites with manna. õThis radical critique cost Strauss his job at the University of Tübingen. Note that Strauss was an original thinker, but he was also totally a product of the university system that German reformers had worked hard to create. That system was, itself, a radical critique of old models of higher education, so it’s only natural that it would produce theological radicals like Strauss. õThe epicenter of political and social reform at the time was Prussia, in what is now eastern Germany. In the early 19 th century, the bureaucrats of the Prussian government believed that they had a duty to encourage the formation of loyal and ethical Prussian citizens. Education was the state’s business, not the business of churches.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  One spring day in 1951, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota was waiting to catch the subway to the Capitol when Lyndon Johnson suddenly approached him and suggested they ride together and talk. Such words were like music to Humphrey; he almost couldn’t believe Johnson was sincere in the offer. Humphrey had joined the Senate at the same time as Johnson, and he had been considered the bigger star, a charismatic liberal who could be president one day. Humphrey, however, had a problem that had completely impeded his rise to the top: he believed so stridently in liberal causes that he had alienated almost everyone else. In his first speech to the Senate, Humphrey criticized the institution for its slow pace of change and its cozy atmosphere. Soon he was paid back in kind—relegated to the worst committees. The bills he introduced went nowhere. When he would walk into the Senate cloakroom, he would be shunned by almost everyone. As this ostracism got worse, Humphrey felt increasingly depressed and despondent. Sometimes driving home from work, he would pull over and cry. His career had taken a very wrong turn. In the subway car together, Johnson praised him effusively. “Hubert,” he told him, “you have no idea what a wonderful experience it is for me ride to the Senate chamber with you. There are so many ways I envy you. You are articulate, you have such a broad range of knowledge.” Feeling relieved to hear this, Humphrey was then surprised by the vehemence of Johnson’s criticisms that followed. “But goddammit, Hubert, you’re spending so much time making speeches that there is no time left to get anything done.” Humphrey needed to be more pragmatic, fit in better. When they finally parted, Johnson invited Humphrey to stop by his office one day for drinks. Humphrey soon became a regular visitor, and this southern senator, quite loathed by northern liberals as the darling of the conservative Russell, enthralled him. First, Johnson was immensely entertaining. Everything he said was accompanied by some folksy anecdote, often of a bawdy nature but always teaching some wicked lesson. Sitting in his office, the drinks being lavishly poured, he would instigate bouts of laughter that would reverberate through the corridors. It was hard to resist a man who could put you in a good mood. He had incredible presence. As Humphrey later wrote, “He’d come on just like a tidal wave sweeping all over the place. He went through walls. He’d come through a door and he’d take the whole room over.” Second, he had such invaluable information to share. He taught Humphrey all of the intricacies of Senate procedure and the knowledge he had accrued about the psychological weaknesses of various senators through close observation.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  attention. She decides she will seduce him and become the target of his attention. She will play to his fantasies. How can he not want to settle down with her and reform himself? She will bask in his love. But somehow he is not as strong, masculine, or romantic as she had imagined. He is a bit self-absorbed. She does not get the desired attention, or it does not last very long. He cannot be reformed, and leaves her. This is often the projection of women who had rather intense, even flirtatious relationships with the father. Such fathers often find their wives boring, and the young daughter more charming and playful. They turn to the daughter for inspiration; the daughter becomes addicted to their attention and adept at playing the kind of girl that daddy wants. It gives her a sense of power. It becomes her lifelong goal to recapture this attention and the power that goes with it. Any association with the father figure will spark the projecting mechanism, and she will invent or exaggerate the man’s romantic nature. A prime example of this type would be Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Jack Bouvier, her father, adored his two daughters, but Jacqueline was his favorite. Jack was devilishly handsome and dashing. He was a narcissist obsessed with his body and the fine clothes that he wore. He considered himself macho, a real risk taker, but underneath the façade he was in fact quite feminine in his tastes and totally immature. He was also a notorious womanizer. He treated Jackie more like a playmate and lover than a daughter. For Jackie, he could do no wrong. She took perverse pride in his popularity with women. In the frequent fights between her mother and father, she always took his side. Compared to the fun-loving father, the mother was prudish and rigid. Spending so much time in his company, even after her parents divorced, and thinking of him constantly, Jackie deeply absorbed his energy and spirit. As a young woman, she turned all of her attention to older, powerful, and unconventional men, with whom she could re- create the role she had played with her father—always the little girl in need of his love, but also quite flirtatious. And she was continually disappointed in the men she had chosen. John F. Kennedy was the closest to her ideal, for in so many ways he was just like her father in looks and in spirit. Kennedy, however, would never give her the attention she craved. He was too self-absorbed. He was too busy having affairs with other women. He was not really the romantic type. She was continually frustrated in this relationship, but she was trapped in this pattern, later marrying Aristotle Onassis, an older, unconventional man of great power who seemed so dashing and romantic but who would treat her horribly and cheat on her continually. Women in this scenario have become trapped by the early

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  First, they have to figure out a way to build track over or blast through the Tehachapi Mountains, which is necessary to connect Bakersfield with Los Angeles to its south. That issue pales in comparison to a second bottleneck, a portion of the Diablo Range known as the Pacheco Pass that stands between the Central Valley and the Bay Area to its north. It’s not as if the Authority had no way to know about the existence of these barriers in 2010. The Tehachapi Mountains and the Pacheco Pass have been around for at least five million years, certainly at the time the Authority put together the route, along with the plan to blast through the mountains and build long tunnels underneath. In 2018, the Authority admitted the tunnels under the Pacheco Pass present “the highest uncertainty in terms of cost and schedule.” They know there will be enormous expenses and difficulties blasting through mountains, contending with technical geological obstacles, and crossing an active seismic fault. But what they don’t know is whether, how, when, or at what cost they can do this. In 2020, the Authority admitted the enormity of the engineering challenge. The project’s tunneling corridors (including the Pacheco Pass and the Tehachapi Mountains) “make up nearly 80 percent of the total estimated cost” of completion. You might assume that, after finally recognizing that addressing the two bottlenecks will be uncertain and, possibly, both intractable and prohibitively expensive, the Authority would figure out the details of solving those challenges before doing any additional building. After all, if you can’t figure out how to connect LA to San Francisco at a cost in the realm of what taxpayers are willing to bear, what’s the point of building any other track? Yet, in 2019, instead of seizing what seemed like, from the perspective of an outsider looking in, the perfect moment to shut the whole thing down, Governor Gavin Newsom approved a plan to complete a section of track connecting Bakersfield to Merced in the north, completely unconnected with the two engineering bottlenecks. Merced is 110 miles from San Francisco, on the wrong side of the Pacheco Pass. And Bakersfield is 100 miles from LA, on the wrong side of the Tehachapi Mountains. Once they complete that track, the plan is to turn their attention to construction connecting San Francisco and Silicon Valley, two areas already pretty well connected by roadways. Even worse than the redundancy of building that section of the route, both areas sit to the north of the Pacheco Pass. So, in a move that defies common sense, the plan is to keep building without addressing the issues that will eventually be responsible for at least 80% of the cost of the bullet train. Because it is cheaper and easier, they are going to build a very fast train that won’t actually go from anywhere or to anywhere, at least not anywhere people reasonably expected from the promise at the outset of the project in 2008.

• From The Boys of My Youth (1998)

  I indicate the grass next to me. “You sit down.” We watch the other campers for a while, roasting their things, drinking their stuff, laughing and punching each other. “I can’t stay here if you’re going to sing,” Elizabeth tells me. I stop singing. Off in the distance the lizardy sound of Mick Jagger starts up, more cars arrive, people shout for no reason. The red lily has made me feel both weightless and heavy at the same time. The night air is cool against my sunburned arms. I can’t remember what I did with my shoes. The only thing that would make me happier at this moment is if I could sing Bang, bang, Maxwell’s silver hammer , but Liz won’t let me. I try humming it softly but she starts to stand up so I have to cut it out. I wonder where Waldo is. Renee and her boyfriend Pete emerge out of the darkness. She has my T-shirt and shoes. Even though my arms are balloon strings, I manage to get the shirt on and slip my swimming suit top off; the shoes I cannot even begin to contend with. Pete is short and very cool, with bedroom eyes, dark curly hair, and an uncivilized manner. Renee is working on taming him. He likes it that I took my swimming suit top off even though he didn’t get a glimpse of anything. “Nice tits,” he says generously. We send him to get beers but right before he leaves he bestows a big, fat birthday kiss on me. I dry my face on my T-shirt. Here comes Janet, so tan her blond hair looks fake. She’s got a concerned look on her face. Well, there’s bad news. Wally’s fiancée, Leeann, has just arrived unexpectedly. It was a surprise; she blew in from the north like bad weather, and now my birthday is wrecked. Everyone groans, including Tom and Pete, who like it when I’m in a good mood. Bang bang Maxwell’s silver hammer came down upon her head . I shrug and put a decent face on it. I can’t think of anything to sing. At some point during the evening Wally catches my eye. Leeann is standing with her back to me, looking wifely and cruel. He holds his hands palms-up in the age-old gesture of Hey, this is not my fault . I look away with no expression on my face. Tom brings me a roasted marshmallow that burns the roof of my mouth. I lean my head on his knee and he pats my sunburned shoulder. It’s my nineteenth birthday and here I am, Eleanor Rigby. “She married him right out from under me,” I say. We’re back to the phone booth. All I have to do is close my eyes and I can see his long, pipe-cleaner legs, his hazel madman’s eyes. He still remains the legendary good kisser. She wants to know what made it legendary.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Kwan was unmatched in the U.S. Championships, winning in 1996 and then in eight straight years, from 1998 to 2005. Cohen was right behind her. Excluding 2001, when she had to withdraw due to a stress fracture in her back, between 2000 and 2006, this was her performance line at the U.S. Championships: silver, silver, bronze, silver, silver, and gold. Only Michelle Kwan (and reigning Olympic champion Sarah Hughes in 2003) finished ahead of Sasha Cohen. As a seventeen-year-old, she finished fourth in the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City and earned gold medals in six Grand Prix competitions in 2002–2003 (including the Grand Prix of Figure Skating Final in 2003). She won six other international events between 2001 and 2005, and medaled at the World Championships in 2004 (silver), 2005 (silver), and 2006 (bronze). During Cohen’s time in figure skating, her focus and persistence was what we expect of the world’s top athletic performers. She started skating at seven and was competing regularly by eleven, when she began homeschooling to maximize her time practicing, training, and competing. The intensity of her commitment led to numerous injuries and related setbacks. She continued to suffer from the back problems that took her out of the 2001 U.S. Championships, limiting her competitive schedule in 2004 and 2005. But 2006 looked like it was going to be Sasha Cohen’s year. Michelle Kwan, now twenty-five, had been training for an Olympic bid but withdrew from three late 2005 competitions due to a hip injury. She also withdrew immediately before the start of the U.S. Championships in January, ending her eight-year winning streak. Cohen earned gold, finally becoming U.S. champion. Kwan petitioned for a medical waiver to compete in the Olympic Games, received it, but then had to withdraw when she suffered an injury during her first practice in Turin. This signaled the end of Michelle Kwan’s competitive skating career. Cohen was now the heir apparent to America’s skating dynasty, which included medals in ten consecutive Olympics, five of them gold, including in three of the previous four Olympics. Cohen held the lead after the short program and the gold medal was hers to lose. But less than thirty seconds into her long program in the finals, she fell. As a testament to how great she was, despite the fall and the instant realization that she would not win, she performed so flawlessly that she still earned silver, adding to her long list of accomplishments. Maybe, if she hadn’t suffered that fall, she would have retired from competition, having won the gold. She already had a bad back and recently suffered through a hip injury. By the next Olympic Games, she would be twenty-five, the same age as Michelle Kwan in her 2006 Olympic attempt, which ended with her inability to compete due to three separate injuries. Instead, in April 2006, just two months after the Olympics, she announced she would return and try for a spot on the 2010 team.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  takes us years to heal from. A little more distance could have let us see the red flags before it was too late. Looking back on our life, we see that we have a tendency to be impatient and to overreact; we notice patterns of behavior over long periods of time that elude us in the moment but become clearer to us later on. What this means is that in the present moment we lack perspective. With the passage of time, we gain more information and see more of the truth; what was invisible to us in the present now becomes visible in retrospect. Time is the greatest teacher of them all, the revealer of reality. We can compare this to the following visual phenomenon: At the base of a mountain, in a thick forest, we have no ability to get our bearings or to map out our surroundings. We see only what is before our eyes. If we begin to move up the side of the mountain, we can see more of our surroundings and how they relate to other parts of the landscape. The higher we go, the more we realize that what we thought further below was not quite accurate, was based on a slightly distorted perspective. At the top of the mountain we have a clear panoramic view of the scene and perfect clarity as to the lay of the land. For us humans, locked in the present moment, it as if we are living at the base of the mountain. What is most apparent to our eyes —the other people around us, the surrounding forest—gives us a limited, skewed vision of reality. The passage of time is like a slow ascent up the mountain. The emotions we felt in the present are no longer so strong; we can detach ourselves and see things more clearly. The further we ascend with the passage of time, the more information we add to the picture. What we saw three months after the fact is not quite as accurate as what we come to know a year later. It would seem, then, that wisdom tends to come to us when it is too late, mostly in hindsight. But there is in fact a way for us humans to manufacture the effect of time, to give ourselves an expanded view in the present moment. We can call this the farsighted perspective , and it requires the following process. First, facing a problem, conflict, or some exciting opportunity, we train ourselves to detach from the heat of the moment. We work to calm down our excitement or our fear. We get some distance. Next, we start to deepen and widen our perspective. In considering the nature of the problem we are confronting, we don’t just grab for an immediate explanation, but instead we dig deeper and consider other possibilities, other possible motivations for the people involved. We force ourselves to look at the overall context of

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Because several of the words were very difficult, they could request a crossword puzzle dictionary (this being in the days before everyone had internet access), but there was only one available and they were told that several other participants were also working on the puzzle in other rooms. That meant they would have to stop working while they waited for the dictionary to become available, but the clock would continue to run. Unbeknownst to the participants in the study, there was no dictionary so the wait would be indefinite. Just over half the participants waited for the nonexistent dictionary beyond the time when the prize for completing the puzzle declined to less than $2.40. In the words of the authors, they waited “beyond this ‘point of no return,’ having been entrapped in a conflict from which there was no longer a satisfactory escape.” Escalation of commitment is costly. If the participants had walked away sooner, they would have made more. It may feel like quitting slows us down, but Rubin and Brockner show that it is persistence that is often the culprit. The work on escalation of commitment over the last forty-five years—in different laboratory experiments, field experiments, and explanations of commonly observed behavior—has shown that this type of entrapment in losing causes occurs across a variety of settings and circumstances. There are all sorts of ways we get stuck in our decisions. Presented with the opportunity and the relevant information, we will over-persist, rejecting the chance to quit and backing up our original decision by spending even more resources to try to save the endeavor. This is true whether it involves spending more time waiting in line or waging an unwinnable war, or staying in bad relationships and bad jobs too long, or pouring money into a car that’s worth less than the repairs are costing us. It’s why a house can become a money pit. It’s why we won’t leave a terrible movie because we have already started watching it. It’s why businesses continue to develop and support products that are clearly failing, or pursue strategies long after conditions have changed. George Ball was right. That kind of behavior is the rule. Persevering in the face of tall odds, as Ali or Rob Hall did, is not exceptional. Quitting a losing course of action before certain failure is. People like Stuart Hutchison, Stewart Butterfield, and Alex Honnold are the exceptions. Chapter 4 Summary When we are in the losses, we are not only more likely to stick to a losing course of action, but also to double down. This tendency is called escalation of commitment. Escalation of commitment is robust and universal, occurring in individuals, organizations, and governmental entities. All of us tend to get stuck in courses of action once started, especially in the face of bad news. Escalation of commitment doesn’t just occur in high-stakes situations. It also happens when the stakes are low, demonstrating the pervasiveness of the error.

• From Reading the Bible from the Margins (2002)

  The Real World is a “reality” show where several young college-age adults from different walks of life are placed together in a mansion, forced to live and deal with each other in an “exotic” U.S. city. Recently, the show's producers chose New Orleans. Of special interest to this book is an exchange that took place between two of the young adults during the ninth episode of the series. Julie is a religious white woman who approaches the real world from her faith. Melissa is a biracial woman dealing with how the dominant culture sees and perceives her. During their conversation, Julie refers to African Americans as “colored people.” Melissa is taken aback by the racial slur and holds Julie accountable for her statement. In self-defense, Julie says that she simply did not know and begins to become emotionally shaken. Through her tears she explains to Melissa how she feels cheated as a result of her sheltered upbringing. Below is the exchange they had: Julie:I'm learning more in this conversation with you than I did in four years of high school and three years of college. And that's disgusting to me.Melissa:Damn right! I would be upset too if I discovered, oh my goodness, I know nothing. You're twenty years old, and there are things that are common knowledge—that are common American knowledge—that you have no idea about because wherever you came from or whatever community you grew up in shut that out. But I mean, now that you recognize that, it is your responsibility now to reach out and find that information.Julie:But I feel like I've been cheated. I feel like I've been withheld from things. It's just not fair! (At this point she breaks down in tears.)Melissa:You have been, and it isn't fair.5Julie's religious foundation is proven to be ineffective in dealing with real life. The interpretations she believed to be truth are seen for what they are, human perspectives, based on the social location of one group, that utterly collapse when seen from the wider perspective of all humanity. Julie's dilemma is common among young white college students who are seldom exposed to nonwhite groups, except for the negative stereotypes prevalent in the public media. To read the Bible solely from one racial or economic perspective (whether it is white or other) shelters the reader from the liberative Good News of the Scripture. With time, the Bible, or better yet, our interpretation of the Bible, itself becomes inadequate in dealing with the real world. READING THROUGH OTHERS’ EYES Can I as a Latino speak for African Americans? Or can I speak for Amerindians or Asians? Can I as a heterosexual man speak for women or homosexuals? Can I, who am employed and considered to be middle-class with the cultural capital of higher education, speak for the poor, those who are underskilled and undereducated? No, of course not. Any attempt on my part to speak for other groups, regardless of my noble intentions, would be paternalistic.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  In September 1992, Sears announced that it was breaking up its financial services empire. It was going to sell those assets and use the money so Sears could “get back to its retailing roots.” Over the next two and a half years, Sears divested itself of all those profitable assets. It sold 20% of Allstate in an IPO raising over $2 billion. It also distributed the remainder of Allstate’s value to shareholders in a stock dividend valued at $9 billion. It divested itself of Dean Witter Discover in the same two-part process, raising $900 million in an IPO and distributing the remaining stock (valued at approximately $4.5 billion) as a dividend. Finally, it sold Coldwell Banker outright for $230 million. Sears, of course, never approached getting out from under its retail problems and went bankrupt. The successful financial services businesses it created, wisely acquired, and skillfully operated went on to thrive. Allstate’s October 2021 stock market valuation was nearly $40 billion. It is the largest publicly held insurer of personal lines, insuring about sixteen million households. Less than five years after Sears spun off Dean Witter Discover, Morgan Stanley bought the company for $10 billion in stock, representing 40% of the combined entity’s value. By October 2021, Morgan Stanley’s stock market valuation was over $180 billion. That valuation does not include the value of Discover, which became a separate public company in 2007 (as Discover Financial Services). Discover’s stock market valuation in October 2021 was almost $40 billion. Coldwell Banker merged with some other real estate companies and went public as Realogy Holdings in 2012. Realogy was involved in 1.4 million home transactions in 2020 and had a stock market valuation in October 2021 in excess of $2 billion. As a retailer, from the midseventies on, Sears found itself in a losing fight. By the beginning of the nineties, the gap between Sears and competitors on all sides had only grown. As of this same period, Sears was also operating an increasingly successful financial services business. When Sears had to make the choice of which assets to sell and which to keep, from the perspective of someone on the outside looking in, the choice should have been easy. Whether that outsider was a rational financial professional or one of the corporate raiders Sears feared were circling, the answer would have been to run with the financial services assets and run from the losing retail game. Yet, Sears did the opposite. It escalated its commitment to the retail stores and sacrificed everything else it owned to finance the fight. Why did this happen? Part of the problem is the fact that you likely only know (or remember) Sears as a retail company. “Sears” and “retail” are synonymous. Retail was their identity. If they had held on to the financial services assets and shuttered or sold the retail company, they would have, in some sense, ceased to be Sears, at least the Sears that everyone knew them as.

• From The History of Christianity II: From the Reformation to the Modern Megachurch (2017)

  167Lecture 17—The Second Great Awakening ONEIDA õFor a few true radicals, all these efforts to change the world were just too slow. Some were so disillusioned with all the sin around them that they decided to break away entirely and build a new society from scratch. õThe most famous example is the Oneida Community. Its founder was a man named John Humphrey Noyes. He was born in Vermont in 1811 and after finishing college at Dartmouth, he came under the inf luence of a revivalist preacher and had his own born-again experience. Noyes came to strive for a community that embodied earthly perfection. õIn 1841, Noyes gathered a community of followers in Putney, Vermont. They pursued his vision of earthly perfection. They lived this out through economic sharing, belief in divine healing, and what they called complex marriage, which involved multiple, planned sexual relationships between husbands and wives in the community. õNoyes’s neighbors were annoyed by this, so the community relocated to Oneida, NY, in 1848. When they got there, Noyes honed his plan for creating a perfect sinless community by selecting a small number of men and women that he deemed worthy for breeding—he was an early eugenicist. õDespite his more eccentric ideas, his hopes did have some inspirational power. His refusal to compromise with the imperfections of society had a big inf luence on the great abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison. 168The History of Christianity II õToday, the Oneida community itself is long gone. It had dwindled to 250 people by the 1870s, and in 1879 Noyes f led to Canada to avoid legal action related to the sexual practices at Oneida. The community dissolved shortly thereafter, in 1881. SUGGESTED READING Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity. Heyrman, Southern Cross. Wol f fe , The Expansion of Evangelicalism. QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER äWhy did the Methodist theology of free conversion to Christ appeal to so many people? äAre there any qualities in a successful religious leader that are consistent over time and place, or do they depend entirely on historical context? äDid evangelical mean the same thing in America, Canada, and Britain? 169 LECTURE 18 THE MORMONS: A TRUE AMERICAN FAITH T his lecture considers the historical origins and the main doctrines of the Mormons. It seeks to come to some conclusions about why this religion has been so amazingly successful, growing from a tiny persecuted sect to a thriving global faith in less than 200 years.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  Our three climbers were part of the 1996 climbing season, chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s famous book Into Thin Air , as well as the popular 1998 documentary Everest and the 2015 feature film also titled Everest . Their expedition leader was Rob Hall, one of the world’s most accomplished alpinists. Hall, along with four others who reached the summit that day, died on various parts of their descent back to Camp 4. Hall was, in fact, the guide with them at the back of the pack who told them they were three hours from the top and then attempted to sprint past the slow climbers ahead of them. This despite Hall being the one who impressed upon them the importance of the 1 p.m. turnaround time back when they were gathered with the other clients at Base Camp. He also set and enforced turnaround times on numerous interim climbs up the mountain. He had even, the previous year, turned around with a client named Doug Hansen only 300 feet from the summit. Hall’s prudence and expertise in establishing and enforcing that turnaround time in 1995 undoubtedly saved Hansen’s life. One of the other guides that year said that Hansen “was fine during the ascent, but as soon as he started down, he lost it mentally and physically; he turned into a zombie, like he’d used everything up.” Rob Hall repeatedly called Hansen during the intervening year, discounting his fee and successfully encouraging him to try again in 1996. Hall reached the summit that next year around 2 p.m. with a small group of climbers. The others—now recognizing that it was getting late—quickly began descending, but Hall waited for Hansen, whom he believed was close behind. Hansen didn’t arrive on the summit until 4 p.m., by which time he was so exhausted that he was unable to climb down the near-vertical Hillary Step. Hall couldn’t get Hansen down and wouldn’t abandon him. They both died. We’ll explore later in this book many of the forces that likely interfered with Hall’s judgment. But for now, what his failure shows is that while turnaround times increase the chances that you’ll make a rational decision about quitting, they don’t guarantee it. Amid the chaos of what happened on the mountain that day, almost no one remembers Hutchison, Taske, and Kasischke, three climbers who followed the rules and turned around. It’s not just that they are uncelebrated. It’s that they made no impression whatsoever. They are invisible. Why do so few remember these three climbers who wisely turned around? It’s not because Krakauer failed to tell their tale in his book. He even noted that, “faced with a tough decision, they were among the few who made the right choice that day.” We tend to think only about one side of the human response to adversity: the ones who go for it . The people who continued up the mountain become the heroes of the story, tragic or otherwise.

• From Quit: The Power of Knowing When to Walk Away (2022)

  If you complete 5 kilometers in the context of a 5K, you’ve succeeded. But if that’s as far as you run in the context of a half-marathon, that’s a failure. If you run 13.1 miles in the context of a half-marathon, that’s a success, but in the context of a full marathon, you have failed. And successfully running 26.2 miles becomes a failure if you were attempting an ultramarathon. To understand why Sasha Cohen endured three years of misery after the 2006 Olympics, we just need to think about the pass-fail nature of goals. Her finish line, going into the 2006 Olympics as the favorite, was to win a gold medal. She fell short, both literally and figuratively, when she stumbled in her long program and had to settle for silver. Second best in the world counts for little when the goal is to be first. And so she continued to skate unhappily in shows, sticking around to try once more in 2010 to reach the finish line. When she finished two places short of making the 2010 Olympic team and finally aged out, that forced her to close that mental account. She felt free, relieved of the burden that the pass-fail nature of goals imposes. Goals work, but sometimes they work to the point where they make us ignore clear signs that the goal is not worth continuing to pursue. When a goal is all-or- nothing, your choices are essentially not to start or stick to the goal no matter what. This is part of what creates the paradox of quitting. The beauty of having the option to quit is that it makes it easier for us to make decisions under uncertainty. Whenever we make a decision, whether it’s starting a race, or starting up a mountain, or starting a business, or starting a relationship, we’re making that decision with incomplete information in a world that’s stochastic. We’re under the influence of luck. The world can change. We can change. For almost anything that we choose to believe or choose to do, we’ll have the option to change our mind or walk away at some point in the future. When we face that decision, we’ll generally have much better information than at the time we made the original choice to start. But that option to quit is only helpful if we actually use it. The problem is that we don’t, and here we see why. Once we start, we put ourselves in the losses. We’re short of our goal, the progress along the way counting for almost nothing.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  Dream House as Hypochondria You tell her she has to go to therapy or else you’re going to leave her. Sullen, she agrees. She does go, for a while. The first morning, you make her coffee and breakfast, so that she’s ready to head out into the world. You feel like a mother on her child’s first day of school. You sit there in your underwear and robe, contemplating the winter morning from the plate- glass window in her kitchen. She returns in a cheery mood, holding a second coffee; her nose and the tops of her ears blushing with winter. “What did the therapist say?” you ask. “I know I shouldn’t be asking, I just think—” “We’re still getting to know each other,” she says. “It’s too early to say.” Things get better for a little bit. They really do. She is attentive, kind, patient. She brings you treats—little foods, dips and things, your favorite—and leaves them for you to find when you wake up. A few weeks later, she tells you over the phone that she’s not going to continue therapy. “It’s too much time,” she says. “I’m really fucking busy.” “It’s one hour a week,” you say, gutted. “Besides, he says I’m totally fine,” she says. “He says I don’t need therapy.” 37 “You threw things at me,” you say. “You chased me. You destroyed everything around me. You have no memory of any of it. Doesn’t that alarm you?” 38 She is silent. Then she says, “I’ve got lots of things to do. You don’t understand how hard I work.” You remember your promise, to leave her if she doesn’t get help. But you don’t push the issue. You will never talk about it ever again. 37. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type X905.4, The liar: “I have no time to lie today”; lies nevertheless. 38. Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, Type C411.1, Taboo: Asking for reason of an unusual action. Dream House as Dirty Laundry One day she asks, Who knows about us? It becomes a refrain. It’s strange—in some past generation this could have meant so many things. Who knows we’re together? Who knows we’re lovers? Who knows we’re queer? But when she asks, the unspoken reason is awful, deflated of nobility or romance: Who knows that I yell at you like this? Who’s heard about the incident over Christmas? She never says exactly that, of course; she just wants to know who you’re talking to, who she should be avoiding, who she shouldn’t bother to try to charm. Every answer enrages her. When you tell her, “No one,” she calls you a liar. When you say, “Just my roommates,” her eyes go flat and hard as flint.