When to Drop Your Tools

We lionize dogged persistence in founders and champion those with the agility to quickly adapt and change directions.

In between, it’s helpful to have some rules of thumb or heuristics to help you make sense of a situation during moments of crisis and unexpected complexity.

One of the most valuable is the concept of dropping your tools, which I picked up from David Epstein’s exceptional book, Range. It’s a finding reported by studies of wildland firefighters who were tragically overcome by advancing fires they might have escaped if they had set down their tools and run.

Be careful about what you’re holding onto when the context has changed. What has worked in the past - products / tech, commercial models, even people - can become counterproductive in the face of new challenges by preventing adaptive and innovative responses.