Annie Duke Quit
Annie Duke Quit
Annie Duke Quit
Dialogue
Title: How to Quit Bad Stuff Faster, with Annie Duke
Kenny Rogers:
“You gotta know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em, know when to walk
away, and know when to run.”
What do professional poker players know about quitting that the amateurs miss?
We quit too late -- we also quit too early. New York cab drivers are an example.
Astro Teller also understands a subtler but no less important point, that we have a
tendency, when we butt up against a monkey that is proving difficult to solve, to turn
our attention to building pedestals rather than giving up.
Key point:
Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of
false progress.
One of the best tools for quitting on time is having kill criteria. What are they?
Example? Everest.
The best quitting criteria combine two things: a state and a date.
Your invitation --> better not perfect. One way you did this in poker was having a stop-
loss. What does that look like?
Chapter title:
Find Someone Who Loves You but Doesn’t Care about Your Feelings.
Instead, when someone comes to you, it’s better to use Ron Conway’s approach,
which can be summarized in these four steps. STEP 1 | Let them know that you think
they should consider quitting. STEP 2 | When they push back, retreat and agree with
them that they can turn the situation around. STEP 3 | Set very clear definitions
around what success is going to look like in the near future and set them down as kill
criteria. STEP 4 | Agree to revisit the conversation and, if the benchmarks for success
haven’t been met, you’ll have a serious discussion about quitting.
Quotes
Given the way the scale is gaffed toward grit, and the way we admire people who
persist as heroes, it shouldn’t surprise us that books about the power of
perseverance, like Angela Duckworth’s Grit and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (with its
famous ten-thousand-hours trope), are so popular. The implication of the massive,
enthusiastic audience for such books is that the human condition is one of
persevering too little. But anybody who reads Grit as suggesting that perseverance,
ab- sent context, is always a virtue, is misinterpreting Angela Duckworth’s work. She
would never say, “Just stick with things and you’ll succeed.” She has herself written
about the importance of trying lots of things (which requires that you quit lots of
other things) to find the thing that you want to stick with. Duckworth, whose book
makes the case for the importance of persistence, would certainly agree that know-
ing when to quit is a skill worth developing.
There is a well-known heuristic in management consulting that the right time to fire
someone is the first time it crosses your mind. This heuristic is meant to get
businesses to the decision sooner, be- cause most managers are reluctant to
terminate personnel, hanging on to them too long.
References