The way our lives turn out is the result of two things: the influence of skill and the influence of luck. - Annie Duke

One of the steps to becoming a better quitter is to not accept "I'm not ready to make a decision right now" as a sentence that makes sense. At every moment of your life, you have a choice about whether to stay or whether to go. When you choose to stay, you are also choosing to not go. When you choose to quit, you are also choosing to not continue.

But omission-commission bias causes us not to view these decisions as equivalent. That's why we accept that explanation of "I'm not ready to make a decision yet" from others and why we accept it from ourselves. Of course, what that really means is "I'm not ready to veer from the status quo."

When we identify the goal and work backward from there to "remember" how we got there, the research shows that we do better. In a Harvard Business Review article, decision scientist Gary Klein summarized the results of a 1989 experiment by Deborah Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington. They "found that prospective hindsight — imagining that an event has already occurred — increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%."