I'll have to check out some of these books personally but I'm curious if anyone has read the "The Dip: A little book that teaches you when to quit." I'm interested if someone can give a little more detail as to how the author explains and turns into a procedure, the process of understanding and the actions of when to quit.<p>Two quotes the site claims are, "If you can't be the best in your class, you should quit" and "Quitting does not make you a failure, you quit to avoid failure." It struck me as a little dangerous and possible that if this is the kind of understanding that results from the book, people might skip out too quickly - something that I see in education too often when persistence and effort could have done wonders. In my opinion, it is very important to know when to ADMIT failure (as opposed to avoid failure) and learn from it. Surely it's also good advice that at some points in our lives we should know when to cut our losses and move on to the next thing. Does this book do this in a deep and objective way?<p>There is a lot of evidence that people are pretty poor at assessing themselves. Second, the idea of failure avoidance is a common trait of people with fixed implicit theories of self and low effort-belief (traits correlated with lower performances, at least on tasks in the domain of education.) Third, people are really good at justifying their actions to preserve their self concepts. Ingredients that unless accounted for, seem like they could be dream killers with a slight push called "go ahead, quit."<p>Now, I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt that the actual book probably goes much more in depth as to when and how to make this sort of assessment but I thought I'd bring it up. Your thoughts?