Jon Goff has an interesting post on deciding when to quit, a critical ability for success.

Is it always right to keep going and see any difficult task through to completion, no matter the difficulty? Or is it best sometimes to reevaluate and change course when the going gets tough? How do you know which situation is which?

One of the things I got hammered into me growing up was the power of determination. If you set your mind to it, the saying goes, there is almost nothing you can’t accomplish. Unfortunately, I’ve ran into several situations in the past which have made me wonder when it really is best to keep slogging through a tough problem, and when it truly is wisest not to keep slogging away at it, but to completely change courses.

In a sense, this is a trap into which NASA has fallen many times (Shuttle and ISS both being excellent examples, and Ares may be as well), but they are often forced by politics to forge ahead with bad ideas. This is one of the many reasons that we will have to privatize space in order to make much progress.

There’s probably a lesson here for the administration vis a vis Iraq as well–clearly, we’ll have to do something different. The problem is that now the different thing that the people in charge want to do is give up and claim defeat, instead of coming up with a way to win.