Annie Duke was a young rising researcher and scholar with a dissertation due when she developed chronic stomach problems that put her in the hospital. No amount of toughing it out was going to work.

She was broke because she had to give up an academic fellowship, and dispirited because the ladder she’d been climbing had suddenly collapsed beneath her.

Duke turned to poker to make ends meet.   

She’d watched her brother play professionally and thought she knew something about the game.

Turns out, she did.  

She would end up earning more than $4 million on the poker circuit and delaying her return to academics for nearly two decades. What did she learn from that experience?  

That’s in her terrific new book, titled, “Quit." She writes, ”being forced to quit gets you to see options that have been right under your nose all along in a new light.”

Duke introduces us to athletes, entertainers, CEOs and coaches who all have interesting relationships with quitting.

Duke reminds us that in a culture that has elevated grit as a virtue, quitting is now seen as its opposite. But that’s the kind of tunnel vision that closes off other more rewarding opportunities.

She writes, “People stick to things all the time that they don’t succeed at, sometimes based on the belief that if they stick with it long enough, that will lead to success. Sometimes they stick with it because winners never quit. Either way, a lot of people are banging their heads against the wall, unhappy because they think there is something wrong with them rather than something wrong with the advice.”

— Kerri Miller | MPR News