Annie Duke on the Power of Quitting

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 November 2022

⏱️ 82 minutes

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Summary

Annie Duke is angry that quitting gets such a bad rap. Instead of our relentless focus on grit and "going for it," the former professional poker player, decision strategist, and author of Quit wants us to recognize the costs associated with sticking to a losing outcome. Listen as she explains to EconTalk host Russ Roberts how society's conflation of grit with character has made quitting unnecessarily hard, and why our desire for certainty harms our decision-making ability. Additional topics include the flawed mental accounting that makes us confuse wins for losses, what we can learn from ants, and the tragic story of how the refusal to quit cost 16 lives one terrible night at the top of Mt. Everest.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.
0:07.8	I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover
0:12.7	Institution.
0:13.7	Go to econtalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode and find links down
0:18.6	the information related to today's conversation.
0:21.4	You'll also find our archives, but every episode we've done going back to 2006.
0:26.8	Our email address is mail at econtalk.org.
0:30.3	We'd love to hear from you.
0:37.8	Today is October 27th, 2022, and my guest is author Annie Duke, her latest book and the
0:44.6	subject of today's conversation is quit.
0:47.6	The power of knowing when to walk away.
0:50.6	Annie, welcome to econtalk.
0:52.6	Well, I'm happy to be here, Russ.
0:55.4	Now I couldn't help but notice that your book has a one syllable title, which is ideal,
1:02.4	which is a fabulous thing.
1:04.4	But it also happens to rhyme with grit, a book with a apparently different perspective,
1:13.6	but which is Angela Duckworth's book, which we've talked about in this program, but talk
1:18.0	about what is the difference between quit and grit.
1:20.2	They sound like they're opposite.
1:22.2	Yeah, so the fact that it's called quit and rhymes with grit is not accidental.
1:28.4	That is by design.
1:32.4	Let me just for say that I really don't have any quibble with the book grit.
	...

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