The Dip: Summary and Review

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

Review

A meditation on when the fabled “trough of mediocrity” is worth pushing through, and when it is not.

Reminds me of The Startup Curve, “Trough of Sorrow” and “Wiggles of False Hope”

Zipf’s law: “Winner take all” value of being the best in the world; it’s worth it to take the risk to be the very best instead of being average.

“The Dip”: The part of difficult projects where you feel like a failure and want to give up—but just on the other side is success. The difficult part is that sometimes a “dip” is a real indicator that this is just not worth your talents, or the goal is mismatched to your skills, or you really just can’t do it, and the key is to figure out when you should quit (and cut your losses) or when the dip is just a forerunner to getting success.

“Quit if you can’t be #1”.

Don’t quit if it’s because of pride, sunk costs, panic, trying to influence someone, or still making measurable progress.