From James Stone, Buxton, Derbyshire, UK
We can learn much about when to give up from the natural world. When a bee is collecting pollen, there is an optimal time to give up expending increasing amounts of energy, and deliver the pollen to the hive (15 November, p 28).
Charnov’s marginal value theorem states that if there are diminishing returns on effort (which there usually are) then maximising long-term rewards is achieved by quitting when the initially high instantaneous reward rate falls to a point where it equals the long-term reward rate.
The lesson for us is that we should quit struggling with an increasingly unrewarding project when the long-term reward starts to flat-line. This might seem obvious, but what is obvious is not always true, so it is good to have such intuitions confirmed by such a beautiful theorem.
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