I don’t know you as well as I would like to, but I do know one thing.
Quitting your job on Monday might not be the worst thing that could happen to you career.
In fact, if I say the full force of the math, it might even put it on an upward trajectory after the dust settles.
Let me explain.
The vexing problem of when to stop sampling
By now you’ve probably run into the secretary problem, which asks you to imagine you’re hiring an executive assistant with 100 candidates.
Because you want to make a strong choice in the face of time constraints and uncertainty, you want to maximize your chances of choosing the best candidate without having to see them all.
How many people will you interview for this?
Believe it or not, the answer is nowhere near 100.
Actually, it’s 37.
Mathematicians studying optimal stopping have shown that when options come in a row and you can’t go back, the best strategy is to spend about 37% of your options on non-committal follow-ups (eg, Ferguson, 1989). You use this step to understand what’s out there and then choose the next option that surpasses everything you’ve seen so far. This approach increases the probability of having the best overall selection.
Sampling long enough to read your surroundings and how they fit with it is not a waste, but a prerequisite to making the best decision.
Now think about how you got to where you are today.
Have you explored anything close to 37% of the options available to you?
Or did you choose the first or third life path, reinforced by early praise and quiet pressure until you learned enough to know what you were aiming for?
Careers don’t look like careful optimization and look like early lockouts.
How to deal with low research
Developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik described the difference between how children and adults learn using simple metaphors (Gopnik, Griffiths, & Lucas, 2015). Children work like lamps, shining a wide light and exploring a wide range of possibilities. Adults act like spotlights, focusing on what is immediately relevant and filtering out the rest. In experiments, children consistently outperform adults on tasks that require them to identify unusual patterns or hidden rules because they search more widely and remain open to alternatives.
This change comes at a cost. When we narrow down too early, we stop seeing the full picture of the options available to us.
Arne Gullich and colleagues show a similar pattern at peak performance (Güllich et al., 2025). Among the tens of thousands of elite performers, the path to the top is rarely what our career consultants want us to think about.
Early specialization is not the rule, but the exception when it comes to the greats. Many top performers delay commitment, moving across domains and building a broader base before committing. This extended sampling period allows them to find a better fit between their skills and their field.
Here we are stuck somewhere along the lines of trajectories that peaked years ago or may still have room for growth.
The good news is that it doesn’t matter where things are today, rather than where they will go if we reopen the search.
Therefore, even if you are deeply attached to your current role, it makes sense to take back control of the sampling process and start researching deliberately again.
There are two ways to restart the sampling process
First, get your mind back into discovery mode by reading three books at once.
A power you have should be boosted, a specific weakness should be countered, and the third should be completely random. By doing this, you re-establish the habit of scanning broadly rather than drilling down narrowly, allowing yourself to let go of what doesn’t serve you by putting away the book you don’t need. attention.
Second, make your counterfactuals real.
Go back to a major decision in your life and rebuild the path you didn’t choose. If you weren’t doing your current job, what would you be doing instead? What was your backup plan if your first choice for college fell through? Most people can quickly answer this because the alternative was real at the time.
Now start walking on this road in small ways. Read what you read, learn what you learn, talk to people in that space, and immerse yourself until you stop feeling the alternative hypothetical and feel viable.
Grit has its place; This will help you stay on track while you’re on the right track and make sure you don’t end up prematurely crossing the finish line.
But when you’re locked in too early, it becomes the glue that binds you to a version of your life chosen with too little information.
So don’t waste your anger on the wrong hill.
Expand your search, up your game, and go all out to climb your own Mount Everest instead.
