The sunk cost fallacy isn’t just about economics — it’s also about identity.

Quitting doesn’t always mean failure. There is wisdom in recognizing when persistence has become the obstacle.

You are not your projects — it is important to separate self from outcome.

“Winners never quit and quitters never win” goes the famous motivational quote attributed to legendary football coach Vince Lombardi. It’s a great expression of our culture’s veneration of grit and persistence: We celebrate never giving up, we admire people who pushed through when others would have quit. And this makes sense. Persistence is admirable and it is essential for overcoming many of the challenges we face in life. But as the Greek philosopher Aristotle saw 2000 years ago, actions pushed to their extreme turn into vice.

There is a famous fable about the Scottish king Robert the Bruce. Robert had gone into battle six times with the English, and lost each time. After his sixth defeat, he took refuge in a cave, ready to abandon his cause. And there he watched a spider try to anchor its web to the cave wall. The spider tried and failed again and again – six times, in fact – before finally succeeding on the seventh attempt.

After bearing witness to this anthropomorphized life lesson, the Bruce decided to return to the fight, winning independence for the Scots – on the seventh attempt.

This story has come back to me many times over the years. In my twenties, I recalled it when struggling to build my first company; a few years later, it inspired me again when I set out to reboot after being fired from my second business. Robert’s story offers a deep well of inspiration for those who most need it. But lately I’ve been thinking about a possibility the fable ignores.

What if the spider had been climbing the wrong corner of the cave? What if the web, once built, would have caught nothing?

The Danger of Persistence

The harder we work at the wrong thing, the more we invest in it. And the more we invest in something, the harder it becomes to see that we have made a mistake. We become less able to ask whether the task is still worth pursuing – and less able to hear when the answer is no.

Economists call this the sunk cost fallacy. It’s their name for the tendency to keep investing in something because of what we’ve already put in, even when the best path forward is to stop. We throw good money after bad, good years after wasted ones.

Money and time are important. But the sunk cost fallacy often comes from something even deeper – our attachment to how we define ourselves. For example, the entrepreneur doesn’t just have a business; she is a founder. The role becomes existential. And so, when she faces the prospect of winding up the business, she’s not just conducting a dispassionate cost-benefit analysis. She’s confronting the loss of who she thought she was.

Our egos get tangled up in our commitments. We start to believe that if a project fails, it means something about who we are. We stop being able to see the situation clearly because seeing clearly might mean confronting something we don’t want to face.

No wonder we find it difficult to quit.

Separating Self From Outcome

Here is a truism that sounds trivial but is deeply important to internalize — a truth that we must feel with our hearts, not just know with our minds: You are not the project.

Your worth as a person is not determined by whether a particular project succeeds or fails.

Once we begin to feel this, once we untangle our identity from the outcome, we can, first of all, assess quitting more calmly. It is not a question of you failing or being a failure. It is simply a question of whether the project is worth continuing or not.

Separating ourselves from our projects also allows us to see that the end of a project does not destroy the value of what has gone before. I have had to shut down companies I built, but I carry forward the skills, relationships and insights that I gained from the experience.

Quitting is in fact necessary for growth – as those famous philosophers the Red Hot Chili Peppers argue, destruction may lead to tough times, but it is often a necessary condition of creation. By ending something, we create space for something new to grow. We need to exit the things that don’t work anymore to be able to enter the projects that make sense for who we are today.

In a word, all beginnings require endings. And quitting is therefore necessary for starting anew.

Five Practices for Learning How to Quit

Being able to quit is a skill that requires deliberate effort to develop. Here are five practices that may help:

Name what you’re protecting. Ask yourself honestly: Am I holding on because this still makes sense, or because letting go feels like losing part of myself?

Map what you never controlled. Write down everything that influenced the outcome – timing, market forces, other people’s choices, luck. See how much was never fully yours to determine.

Give grief a container. Set a timer for fifteen minutes. Let yourself feel the disappointment, the sadness, the anger. When the timer ends, stand up. Take a walk. You’ve honored the loss without being consumed by it.

Reframe the story. Instead of “I failed,” try: “I learned something important” or “I made the best choice I could with what I knew.”

Ask the clean question. If you were starting fresh today – no history, no sunk costs, no identity at stake – would you begin this thing? If the answer is no, that’s important information.

The Spider’s Second Lesson

Let me end by being quite clear about what I’m saying.

To repeat, I’m not saying that persistence is something bad. What I’m saying is that there’s a crucial difference between failing at the right thing and persisting at the wrong one. When we fail at the right thing, persistence makes sense. We learn, adjust, try again. But when we persist with the wrong thing, every ounce of effort takes us further from where we’re meant to be.

I’m saying that we can imagine a different version of the story of Robert the Bruce. In this story, the spider falls a seventh time. It pauses on the stone floor – and then turns, crawling toward a different corner of the cave, where the wind is calmer and the flies more plentiful.

In this new version, the spider understands something it took me years to learn: Quitting is not always weakness. Sometimes, it’s wisdom.

© Psychology Today