The actual outcome casts a shadow over your ability to remember what you knew at the time of the decision. - Annie Duke

Third, and perhaps most important, the turnaround time is a reminder that the real goal in climbing Everest is not to reach the summit. It is, understandably, the focus of enormous attention, but the ultimate goal, in the broadest, most realistic sense, is to return safely to the base of the mountain.

Being forced to quit forces you to start exploring new options and opportunities. But you should start exploring before you're forced to. Even after you have found a path that you want to stick to, keep doing some exploration. Things change, and whatever you are doing now may not be the best path for you to pursue in the future. Having more options gives you something to switch to when the time is right. Exploration helps you to diversify your portfolio of skills, interests, and opportunities. A diversified portfolio helps to protect you against uncertainty. Backup plans are good to have especially because some backup plans can turn out to be better than what we're already pursuing.

That means you have to keep checking back in on the cost-benefit analysis that the goal is a proxy for. You should reevaluate, on a regular cadence, whether the values that you're trying to privilege are still being privileged and whether the values that you're deprivileging, the costs that you're bearing, are still worth it. Those check-ins also offer an opportunity to reevaluate old kill criteria and set new ones.