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I don’t know you as well as I wish I did, but I do know one thing.
Quitting your job the moment Monday comes along might not be the worst thing that could happen to your career.
In fact, I have the full force of mathematics behind me when I say that it might even put it on an upward trajectory once the dust settles.
Let me explain.
The pesky problem of when to stop sampling
By now, you must have come across the secretary problem, which asks you to imagine that you are recruiting an executive assistant with 100 candidates.
Being short on time and keen on making a strong choice under uncertainty, you want to maximize your chances of selecting the best possible candidate without seeing them all.
How many people do you interview to do just that?
Believe it or not, the answer is nowhere close to 100.
In fact, it is 37.
Mathematicians studying optimal stopping showed that when options arrive in sequence, and you cannot return to earlier ones, the best strategy is to spend roughly the first 37 percent of your opportunities observing without committing (e.g., Ferguson, 1989). You use that phase to understand the range of what is out there, and then you select the next option that beats everything you have seen so far. This approach maximizes the probability that you end up with the best overall choice.
Sampling long enough to get a read of your environment, and how you match with it, is not wasteful as much as it is a prerequisite for making the best decision you can.
Now reflect on how you have come to where you are today.
Did you explore anything close to 37 percent of the options available to you?
Or did you take the first or third viable path that opened up, reinforced by early praise and the quiet pressure to commit before you had enough information to know what you were committing to?
Careers look far less like careful optimization and far more like early locking.
How to cope with underexploration
Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik has described the difference between how children and adults learn using a simple metaphor (Gopnik, Griffiths, and Lucas, 2015). Children operate like lanterns, casting a wide beam and exploring broadly across possibilities. Adults operate like spotlights, focusing narrowly on what seems immediately relevant and filtering out the rest. In experiments, children consistently outperform adults in tasks that require discovering unusual patterns or hidden rules because they search more widely and remain open to alternatives.
That shift comes at a cost. When we narrow too early, we stop seeing the full landscape of options available to us.
Arne Güllich and his colleagues show a similar pattern at the highest levels of performance (Güllich et al, 2025). Across tens of thousands of elite performers, the path to the top is rarely as straight a line as our career counselors might want us to think.
Early specialization is the exception when it comes to the great ones, not the rule. Many of the best performers delay commitment, move across domains, and build a broader base before locking in. That extended sampling period allows them to find a better match between their abilities and their field.
And here we are, stuck somewhere along trajectories that may have peaked years ago or might still have room to grow, without a clear sense of which is true.
The good news is that where things are today matters far less than where they can go if we reopen the search.
This is why it makes sense to take control of the sampling process again and deliberately restart exploration, even if you feel firmly anchored to your current role.
Two ways to restart the sampling process
First, get your mind back into exploration mode by reading three books at a time.
One should reinforce a strength you already have, one should challenge a clear weakness, and the third should be entirely random. With this, you are rebuilding the habit of scanning widely rather than drilling narrowly, and giving yourself permission to abandon what does not serve you by laying down whatever book no longer holds your attention.
Second, make your counterfactuals real.
Go back to a pivotal decision point in your life and reconstruct the path you did not take. If you had not taken your current job, what would you have done instead? If your first choice for college had fallen through, what was the backup plan? Most people can answer this quickly because the alternative was real at the time.
Now start walking that path in small ways. Read what you would have read, learn what you would have learned, talk to people in that space, and immerse yourself until the alternative stops feeling hypothetical and starts feeling viable again.
Grit has its place; it helps you stay the course when you are on the right path, and it makes sure you don’t stop marching towards the finish line before your time.
But when you have locked in too early, it turns into glue that keeps you attached to a version of your life that was chosen with too little information.
So do not waste your grit on the wrong hill.
Expand your search, improve your match, and then commit with full force to climbing your own Mt. Everest instead.
