The Dead Horse: The Art of Knowing When to Quit
Why Persistence Isn’t Always the Answer—And How to Know When It’s Time to Walk Away
It was at 2 a.m. on a Saturday morning when the epiphany struck. I watched a drunk guy staggering around the empty townsquare. His eyes were fixed on a bicycle. It took him several pitiful attempts to mount that bicycle. Once up, he became extremely upset and started cursing like a sailor as the bicycle didn't move. At no point during this half-hour ordeal did he realize that it was a bicycle sculpture he had been mounting.
It then hit me that that man was me, staggering through life, trying to mount bicycles that can't ride.
Trying to ride that modern bicycle-horse to no avail.
This man's futile struggle reminded me of an old Dakota saying that captures this human tendency perfectly...
When you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
The Dead Horse
Sounds smart, sounds simple.
The problem is:
We keep doing things that we shouldn't be doing because we are afraid to admit that the horse is dead. And in most cases, it has been dead already for a long time.
Why?
Because it is really hard to find out whether that horse is alive or not.
In general, we prefer not to get off the horse.
We would rather do a multitude of other things instead, according to internet memes, especially if that horse is a corporate horse:
Buying a stronger whip
Changing riders
Appointing a committee to study the dead horse
Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses
Lowering the standards so that dead horses can be included
Hiring outside contractors to ride the dead horse
Harnessing several dead horses together for increased speed
Providing additional funding to increase the horse's performance
Declaring that "no horse is too dead to ride"
Promoting the dead horse to a supervisory position
Rewriting the performance requirements for horses
Creating a training session to improve riding ability
If you have ever worked for someone else, I bet you remember at least one horse, where your assessment of the horses aliveness was different than your superior's - and you got one or more of the above as "help".
To complicate things even more, the internet is full of motivational and inspirational quotes and videos of people showing incredible grit and persistence, dragging themselves and their horse through the finish line.
Our culture's celebration of 'hustle' and 'grit' creates a cognitive bias against quitting. From Edison's '10,000 failures' to Churchill's 'never give up,' we're bombarded with messaging that frames abandonment as weakness. This social programming makes rational assessment of our endeavors exceptionally difficult, even when evidence of failure mounts.
What we usually don't see is the amount of people sticking to their dead horse without ever getting near any finish line. We don't know and see how many dead horses the success stories already had before their win. We instinctively assume it is their first horse and their first ride, which is just plain wrong.
Despite it being 2025 and all the technological progress, there is still no simple way of determining the aliveness of any given horse in your life.
As someone who has a fondness for riding multiple horses and having a veritable horse breeding, I tried to figure out when to declare a horse dead or not early on. It is a key capability of a renaissance lifestyle and one of the skills preventing you from becoming overwhelmed and insane.
I actually set out to explore the topic scientifically and even published a paper on it with a friend – "Epic Fail: Exploring project failure's reasons, outcomes and indicators," Herz & Krezdorn, 2022.
We explored a variety of parameters that are especially relevant when analyzing the health of business horses. There are a couple of indicators, but three are most relevant to our discussion here.
Missed milestones – Consistent failure to hit established progress markers
If you persistently see that no matter what you do, how you ride, what you feed, how you lead, your horses never reach the next milestone – that is a strong indicator of it being more dead than alive.
Classic example is a tech startup developing an app with a clear six-month launch timeline. Despite repeated team meetings, additional hires, and extended deadlines, the project continuously fails to meet development milestones—first by a month, then by three, then indefinitely. Each sprint leads to new bugs or features that push the finish line further away. At some point, despite best efforts, the team must acknowledge that the project is stuck in perpetual delay—a strong sign the "horse" is dead. Reason I know is because I've been there too.
Budget overruns – Costs significantly exceeding projections
Similarly, if you keep pouring money into food, grooming, housing and equipment for that horse, but it is still not moving – that is another strong death indicator. It's along that old saying of not throwing good money after bad - aka the sunk-cost-fallacy.
Favorite example from friends with houses: You set a $20,000 budget to remodel your kitchen. As demolition reveals unforeseen problems, costs begin to accelerate. New appliances, unplanned electrical rewiring, and designer fixtures drive expenses upward. Two months in, the project is 50% over budget, and the kitchen is still unusable. Each additional investment seems only to uncover more issues, suggesting that it may be time to stop before good money follows bad.
Diminishing returns – Increasing effort yielding decreasing results
The opposite of exponential returns: Every hour you spend on that horse brings you fewer distances. You are getting less and less back: less affection, less range. Another sign that this horse has reached its peak.
When I was studying for my final medical exam I spend more and more hours each week revising creating a giant Mindmap with rare diseases and their names. Initially, my test scores improved, but after a point, my test scores plateaued and even start to drop due to burnout and fatigue, despite increasing effort—because no one is testing that many rare diseases anyway.
Try this: Apply the 3-step protocol to your current top race-horse.
It is a strong enough indicator that your horse has a problem when only one of these applies, but even more so if two or more do.
One practical approach is the '3-Strike Assessment':
After identifying concerning signals, set three specific, measurable improvement targets with clear deadlines. If all three are missed despite genuine effort, it's strong evidence your horse has expired. This helped me to create a balanced framework between premature abandonment and endless persistence.
Most of these assessments, though, require you to get off the horse, sitting down and having a good look at yourself and that horse. It's hard to do that while in the saddle.
One of the crucial parts of this process is to call the dead horse a dead horse. To call a spade a spade.
On Letting Go
This is hard enough in personal life and in business life. It is even harder in medicine. I was head of an intensive care burn unit for many years, an institution that treats patients with sometimes unbelievably severe medical conditions. The advances of modern intensive care medicine and our ability to substitute almost every body function with the help of machines – at least for a temporary period – have created situations that are extremely challenging for patients, relatives, and health care personnel. When is a disease too advanced so that further medical treatment becomes an unethical extension of suffering? When to double down to try to support that sliver of hope for miracle-like healings, that I too witnessed? These are hard questions, with no clear answers, where experience can support you in your decision-making.
The long-year exposure and active mental engagement with these emotions and this topic has helped me to maneuver difficult decisions in other areas better.
It is obviously a far fetch to compare extreme medical conditions to – in that light – trivial situations where it is unclear whether to stop or continue.
But the underlying principle of being able to hold the pressure of a dilemma situation and at one point having to come to a conclusion and decision is the same.
Once you come to a conclusion, the next hard part is then being able to let go.
The most important skill you can develop in terms of dealing with your horses is emotional detachment. Or as many smarter writers than me have already concluded: You have to be willing to kill your darlings.
This shouldn't, though, result in you becoming indifferent or cynical. Quite the contrary; it is about developing equanimity. Of becoming the eye of the storm.
As with every death in our life, this also has to do with grief. The grief cycle applies to dead horses too. Expect to experience denial ('it's just temporary'), anger ('I've wasted so much time'), bargaining ('maybe with just one more approach...'), depression ('I'm a failure'), and finally acceptance ('this experience taught me valuable lessons'). Acknowledging these emotions as normal rather than fighting them accelerates your movement toward your next, potentially more viable horse.
It might be your favorite horse – but if it's dead, it's dead. And you have to let go to be able to move on. To claim that this is easy would be an understatement. The skill lies in being able to let go especially because it is hard.
Lessons from Experience
While I was studying economics in parallel to medicine, I also took a course on entrepreneurship. There I met a partner in crime with whom I started two startups. Both failed miserably. The first one – an ad agency around an innovative speaker system that can produce sound that can only be heard at a specific location and nowhere else – was apparently already dead on arrival. It was relatively easy to assess and acknowledge that this horse was dead and move on.
The second one – an online learning platform to teach men how to be more confident around women – unfortunately also died rather early. It took me, though, around two years to come to terms with its death – not before pitching it to investors, faking numbers, investing a lot of money, investing even more time, and telling myself and everyone else that the horse is just a bit tired and is about to start sprinting like a bolt of lightning any minute. It taught me, though, many of the lessons we are exploring here.
One of the most important one being: how to properly bury a dead horse.
Become a Professional Undertaker
Every successful person has their very own graveyard full of horse skeletons.
An almost ousted profession nowadays, the undertaker is an incredibly dignified and important job. He brings closure to a lived life. He facilitates goodbyes. He provides a space to come visit and contemplate past rides and memories.
The more you accept that undertaker role as part of your personality, the better you can facilitate farewells from dear horses and make space for new ones.
It is your job as the undertaker to examine the horse, look at the equipment, the rides ridden, and the experiences made, together with the rider. And to sort out what was good, what can be kept, and what can be learned from this experience.
Once you accept that dead horses are an essential part of life, it opens a treasure trove of insights and significantly more fun with the horses to come.
But then again, all of this only applies if there is actually a destination or direction you want to go towards. Otherwise, it is perfectly fine to spend time with your dead horse, just because it was one of your favorite horses.
My Graveyard
My graveyard is now covering a quite substantial area of my memorial real estate. I have lost track of how many business ideas I started and failed. How many research projects got nowhere. I started to learn about eight different instruments – including that one time I bought a used washboard and thimbles on eBay because I wanted to play that in a New Orleans style jazz combo.
There’s also a whole section of my graveyard dedicated to started and abandoned languages. My attempt at my mother’s tongue never made it past the phrase, “That handbag needs to be stored in the overhead bin.” Mandarin lessons via headphones led to more than one awkward public encounter—though that wasn’t the main reason I gave up. My Spanish ended abruptly when, after proudly finishing my exam early, my teacher slapped me with the exam papers reminding me that Spanish isn’t just Italian with an “s” tacked onto every word. Portuguese lasted only until I shared my tongue-in-cheek theory with my Brazilian teacher that the language began when a dyslexic Spaniard was exiled from his tribe.
And these are just subsections of my graveyard.
This could sound frustrated, but I wouldn't trade any of these rides and experiences. After all, they allowed me to refine my techniques and ride farther with other horses. I still actively play two instruments – clarinet and saxophone – as well as sing in a semi-professional wedding band. I actively speak five languages, the last one I just learned at the age of 40 within four months.
What I want to say – try riding more horses.
You will learn faster to recognize how healthy that horse is, when to use a whip, and when to dismount. You will improve your overall horse selection and riding skills. And you never know what that riding experience will be good for at a later point in your life.
You need more horses
I can only encourage you to have a regular look at your stable. Go through an honest assessment of your every horse and your relation and expectation to it. Like horse doctor's health check.
Take a moment to identify your three most time-consuming pursuits. For each one, honestly rate them on our three health indicators. Does this assessment surprise you? Which horse might need closer examination?
Consider expanding your stable with more horses, training your emotional detachment and gravedigging skills and remember that every "dead horse" has value for future rides.
If you are feeling stuck somewhere and have a hard time figuring out whether your horse is alive or not, reach out. I am considering hosting a "horse-examination-workshop" in the near future.
To more in life,
Nicco
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