You know about Sears, America’s favorite store until it wasn’t. So how is Sears an example of quitting as cited in Annie Duke’s book, “Quit: The Power of Knowing When To Walk Away”?

People know about Sears, the pioneering catalog store that rose to become the nation’s powerhouse retail establishment, accounting for 1 percent of the country’s Gross National Product in 1950, said Duke.

They also know what happened in later years when the store faced competition from the likes of Walmart, Target and others. What folks don’t always recognize is that Sears also spawned Allstate Insurance, the Dean Witter stockbrokerage (later bought up by Morgan Stanley), the Discover card and the Coldwell Banker real estate firm, she said.

Where does quitting come in? Sears quit the wrong thing, said Duke. They chose to tough it out with retail in the 90s when they should have stayed with the financial services side of the business.

Quitting has a negative connotation, Duke told Steve Tarter. “If I call you a quitter, it’s like calling you a loser,” she said. 

But quitting at the right time is not only appropriate, it gets you to your goals, said Duke. “They say, ‘Winners never quit and quitters never win,’ but winners quit a lot. They quit all the stuff that’s not working so they can stick to the things that are,” she said.

Duke, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, also serves as co-founder of the Alliance for Decision Education, a non-profit that seeks to held kids K-12 make better decisions in life, she said.