The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)

Being the Best in the World Is Seriously Underrated

Winners quit all the time. They just quit the right stuff at the right time.

It’s called Zipf’s law, and it applies to résumés and college application rates and best-selling records and everything in between. Winners win big because the marketplace loves a winner.

Best is subjective. I (the consumer) get to decide, not you. World is selfish. It’s my definition, not yours. It’s the world I define, based on my convenience or my preferences. Be the best in my world and you have me, at a premium, right now.

How often do you look for someone who is actually quite good at the things you don’t need her to do? 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 fact, the people who are the best in the world specialize at getting really good at the questions they don’t know. The people who skip the hard questions are in the majority, but they are not in demand.

The Dip is the long slog between starting and mastery. A long slog that’s actually a shortcut, because it gets you where you want to go faster than any other path.

The Dip is the long stretch between beginner’s luck and real accomplishment.

Your marketplace is competitive, filled with people overcoming challenges every day. It’s the incredibly difficult challenges (the Dips) that give you the opportunity to pull ahead.

In a competitive world, adversity is your ally. The harder it gets, the better chance you have of insulating yourself from the competition. If that adversity also causes you to quit, though, it’s all for nothing.

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.

It’s easier to be mediocre than it is to confront reality and quit.

Simple: If you can’t make it through the Dip, don’t start.

If you want to be a superstar, then you need to find a field with a steep Dip—a barrier between those who try and those who succeed. And you’ve got to get through that Dip to the other side. This isn’t for everyone. If it were, there’d be no superstars. If you choose this path, it’s because you realize that there’s a Dip, and you believe you can get through it. The Dip is actually your greatest ally because it makes the project worthwhile (and keeps others from competing with you).

Seven Reasons You Might Fail to Become the Best in the World You run out of time (and quit). You run out of money (and quit). You get scared (and quit). You’re not serious about it (and quit). You lose interest or enthusiasm or settle for being mediocre (and quit). You focus on the short term instead of the long (and quit when the short term gets too hard). You pick the wrong thing at which to be the best in the world (because you don’t have the talent).

Whatever you do for a living, or for fun, it’s probably somehow based on a system that’s based on quitting. Quitting creates scarcity; scarcity creates value.

The next time you catch yourself being average when you feel like quitting, realize that you have only two good choices: Quit or be exceptional. Average is for losers.

The marketers who get rewarded are the ones who don’t quit. They hunker down through the Dip and galvanize and insulate and perfect their product while others keep looking for yet another quick hit.