Last year, I applied for an analyst role at a VC firm, and one of the application questions was: What questions do you spend the most time thinking about?
I really liked the question and how it made me examine my thought patterns, and gave me language for something that had been shaping how I make decisions.
I spend a lot of time thinking about diminishing returns. Not just in the economic sense, but everywhere, in work, creativity, relationships, habits.
How can I slow down an object from approaching diminishing returns quickly?
Or in simpler words, What if I stop?
It’s a question that has several layers: When is it time to push through discomfort? When is it time to stop, pivot, or let go? What am I feeding effort into, and is it still worth it?
In my work in data analytics, I’ve watched countless projects fall into a familiar trap, the belief that more input will always yield better outcomes.
Take linear regression models, for instance. You start with a training set, run the model, and if the accuracy isn’t quite right, there’s a temptation to keep feeding it more data, fine-tune every parameter, and introduce more complexity. It becomes a kind of brute force, an obsession with precision that often produces marginal improvements.
Over time, I started to notice when this pattern was playing out, not just in code, but in life. When was I forcing something to work simply because I had already invested so much into it, when I kept going because stopping felt like failure.
That led me to a bigger question:
What does it mean to make good decisions in the face of uncertainty?
I recently read an essay by Amber Thomas for The Pudding, titled Continue, Pivot or Put it Down. Though it’s about the editorial process behind their data stories, the framing applies almost universally. We need language and permission for quitting thoughtfully. For knowing when to shift directions before we burn out our resources, whether mental, emotional, or financial.
And it’s not about effort or endurance, it’s about the ability to make good judgement.
Judgment is what allows you to stop pushing the model and rethink the problem. It’s what helps you walk away from the wrong job, project, or person without needing a guarantee that the next thing will be better.
That’s the real skill I’ve been trying to get around. The ability to weigh a situation with honesty. To distinguish between discomfort that leads to growth, and discomfort that signals you’re at the edge of diminishing returns.
I have not mastered this at all, but I am building a memory bank of moments when I kept going too long, or pivoted too early, what I missed, what I learned and what I gained.That practice, over time, becomes intuition.
In a world that constantly asks us to do more, stay longer, try harder. Sometimes, the wisest thing you can do is ask:
What if I stopped?