I used to have a rule about books. Started it? Finish it!
It didn’t matter if the plot had stalled, the writing was clunky, or I was literally nodding off mid-sentence—I felt a moral obligation to reach the final page. I thought it was a sign of discipline. I thought it was about grit.
I was wrong. It wasn’t discipline; it was a sunk cost fallacy masquerading as a work ethic.
In a world where your attention is a valuable asset, finishing a bad book isn’t a virtue—it’s a capacity leak.
In the advice world, we talk a lot about “completion bias.” It’s that nagging psychological itch that makes us want to close the loop, regardless of whether the loop is worth closing.
We see it in firms all the time: projects that have lost their way but keep getting funded, or legacy processes that everyone hates but nobody will kill because “we’ve already put so much work into them.”
The DNF (Did Not Finish) is one of the most underrated high-performance habits you can develop. It’s the active decision to value your future time more than your past effort.
The math of the mediocre
Think about the trade-off. If you’re halfway through a 400-page book that isn’t landing, you have two choices. You can spend another five or six hours grinding to the end just to say you did it. Or, you can quit.
By quitting, you haven’t “lost” the first three hours you spent reading. Those are gone anyway. What you’ve actually done is bought back six hours of mental bandwidth. That’s six hours you can spend on a book that actually changes your perspective, or six hours you can spend thinking clearly about a problem in your business that actually needs solving.
High performers aren’t the ones who finish everything; they’re the ones who are ruthless about what stays on the list. They recognise that “busy” is often just a cover for an inability to say no to things that have already proven they aren’t worth the time.
Closing the loop by breaking it
I’ve started applying this more aggressively lately. If I’m twenty minutes into a movie and I’m checking my phone, I turn it off. If a podcast hasn’t delivered a single insight in the first ten minutes, I hit delete. It felt awkward at first—almost like I was failing a test. But the relief on the other side is massive.
When you stop forcing yourself to consume mediocre content, your standard for what is “worth it” naturally rises. You stop accepting “fine” because you know you have the permission to walk away.
The same logic applies to your practice. We often stay stuck in “completion mode” with software that doesn’t fit, or service models that are clearly broken, simply because the effort to quit feels like an admission of failure. It isn’t. Quitting a bad strategy is just a prerequisite for starting a good one.
So, here is your permission slip. The next time you find yourself staring at a page and wondering why you’re still reading: stop. Close the book. Put it on the shelf (or in the bin). Your time is too expensive to spend it being bored by a stranger’s bad writing.
The most productive thing you can do today might just be giving up on something that isn’t working.
