How do I practice kill criteria?

The most direct way to practice kill criteria is through a focused exercise: Pick one active project, commitment, or investment you're currently pursuing. Write down three specific, measurable conditions under which you would abandon it. Be concrete: a date, a number, a threshold. Now show them to someone else and ask: 'Would you hold me to these?' The discomfort you feel is the exact discomfort kill criteria are designed to bypass.

Common pitfall: Setting kill criteria so vague they never trigger ('if things aren't going well') or so extreme they're functionally irrelevant ('if we lose all our customers'). Useful kill criteria live in the uncomfortable middle — specific enough to fire, realistic enough to actually happen. The other failure mode is setting them and then renegotiating when they trigger. If you move the goalposts every time the ball approaches, you don't have criteria — you have theater.

This practice connects to Phase 23 (Decision Frameworks) — building it as a repeatable habit compounds over time.