Many people likely locked into their careers before exploring enough options.

"The 37% rule" shows why early commitment leads to weaker matches.

Grit works best after choosing the right hill to climb.

I don’t know you as well as I wish I did, but I do know one thing.

Quitting your job the moment Monday comes along might not be the worst thing that could happen to your career.

In fact, I have the full force of mathematics behind me when I say that it might even put it on an upward trajectory once the dust settles. Let me explain.

The pesky problem of when to stop sampling

By now, you must have come across the secretary problem, which asks you to imagine that you are recruiting an executive assistant with 100 candidates.

Being short on time and keen on making a strong choice under uncertainty, you want to maximize your chances of selecting the best possible candidate without seeing them all.

How many people do you interview to do just that?

Believe it or not, the answer is nowhere close to 100. In fact, it is 37.

Mathematicians studying optimal stopping showed that when options arrive in sequence, and you cannot return to earlier ones, the best strategy is to spend roughly the first 37 percent of your opportunities observing without committing (e.g., Ferguson, 1989). You use that phase to understand the range of what is out there, and then you select the next option that beats everything you have seen so far. This approach maximizes the probability that you end up with the best overall........

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