You've spent six months on a project that isn't working. Every instinct screams to push harder, invest more, prove you weren't wrong to start. This is exactly when most people make their worst decisions.

The commitment escalation trap catches smart people constantly. It's why gamblers chase losses, why companies pour millions into doomed products, and why you might still be in that career path you chose at nineteen. Understanding this trap—and building systems to escape it—is one of the most valuable decision-making skills you can develop.

Your brain has a quirk that served your ancestors well but sabotages modern decisions: it hates admitting that past investments were wasted. Psychologists call this the sunk cost fallacy, but it's just one piece of a larger puzzle. There's also self-justification—the need to prove your original decision was sound—and loss aversion, which makes potential losses feel roughly twice as painful as equivalent gains feel good.

These forces create a perfect storm. The more you invest, the harder it becomes to walk away. Each additional commitment creates more to lose, which triggers more desperate attempts to make things work. It's a psychological ratchet that only tightens. You're not fighting the situation anymore—you're fighting your own identity as someone who makes good choices.

The cruelest part? Escalation often feels like perseverance. You tell yourself you're being gritty, committed, professional. But there's a crucial difference: perseverance responds to evidence and adjusts course. Escalation ignores evidence to protect ego. Learning to distinguish between them requires building external systems, because in the moment, they feel identical.

Takeaway

The more you've invested in something, the less you should trust your judgment about whether to continue—your brain is actively working against objective assessment.

Here's a principle that transformed how I approach commitments: decide when you'll quit before you start. When you're not yet invested, you can think clearly about what failure actually looks like. Once you're in the middle of things, your judgment becomes progressively compromised.

Kill criteria are specific, measurable conditions that trigger an exit review. For a business venture, it might be: 'If we haven't hit $10K monthly revenue by month eighteen, we seriously evaluate shutting down.' For a relationship: 'If we're still having the same fundamental conflict after six months of genuine effort, we consider whether this is working.' The specifics matter less than having them written down somewhere you can't easily ignore.

The magic of kill criteria is that they separate the decision from the emotion. When your trigger point arrives, you don't have to decide whether to quit—you already decided that. You just have to honestly assess whether you've hit the criteria. It's still hard, but it's dramatically easier than making a fresh decision while drowning in sunk costs. Pre-commitment is your shield against future irrationality.

Takeaway

The best time to decide your exit conditions is before you start—when you can think clearly and haven't yet invested anything worth protecting.

Every minute you spend on something that isn't working is a minute stolen from something that might. This is opportunity cost, and we're terrible at intuiting it because the alternatives remain invisible. The project you're clinging to is concrete and real. The better project you could start instead is hypothetical—and hypotheticals don't trigger our loss aversion.

Strategic quitters ask a different question than most people. Instead of 'Should I quit this?' they ask 'What's the best use of my next thousand hours?' Suddenly, the failing project has to compete against everything else you could do. Quitting isn't giving up—it's choosing something better.

This reframe also helps with the social stigma around quitting. Our culture celebrates persistence stories but conveniently forgets the survivors: for every entrepreneur who succeeded by never giving up, dozens destroyed themselves by refusing to quit. The winners often aren't more persistent—they're better at quitting the wrong things fast enough to find the right ones. Strategic quitting is what makes room for strategic commitment.

Takeaway

Quitting isn't the opposite of success—it's often the prerequisite, because every dead-end path you abandon frees resources for roads that actually lead somewhere.

The commitment escalation trap will keep catching you—that's just how brains work. But you can build systems to catch yourself: kill criteria established upfront, regular honest reviews, and the habit of asking whether you'd start this today if you weren't already invested.

The goal isn't to quit more—it's to quit better. To recognize when persistence becomes stubbornness, and when walking away opens doors you couldn't see while you were busy throwing good resources after bad.