Quitting with Purpose
Lessons from 'Grit' on aligning projects with a vision
I started this website in 2020. I primarily wrote about poker and ways to better understand the game using data. In 2022, that morphed into a business, Solver School, which I have developed and worked on for the last three years.
During that time, I have spent countless hours designing course materials, writing scripts, preparing solver examples, recording and editing 40+ hours of finished video, compiling the videos into a product, launching a website, selling to customers, and providing post-purchase support.
I put in significant effort on the project and am immensely proud of what I created. My work at Solver School can be described as grit.
On a recent weekend, I spent some time reflecting on the business. At the beginning of the next week, I decided to do the grittiest thing I’ve done during my five-year poker content creation journey… quit working on it.
I recently finished reading Grit by Angela Duckworth. It’s a wonderful book about the power of passion and perseverance. Its message models a mentality that I try to embody within my life.
I started reading Grit on a combo work/personal trip. I opened the book after completing Thursday and Friday in the office and read most of it during downtime in my hotel room on Saturday, finishing up the last few chapters on my Sunday morning flight home.
I had originally planned to spend time working on Solver School.
I would update my website and test a new pricing model, with the goal of launching a fall marketing and content push. After taking extended time away from the business during the summer, this project would be my fall sprint.
Or, at least, that was how I had planned to spend part of the weekend. Instead, I procrastinated by reading Grit.
As I read the book, I gained more clarity about Solver School and the right path forward for the business. By the end of the weekend, I was fully comfortable with my decision to stop working on it in the future.
So, the question is: Why would a book about grit – the act of persevering through hard things – convince me to quit working on something that I had put so much time and effort into over the past few years?
On the surface, these ideas appear contradictory. After all, choosing to move on from my business seems like the opposite of gritting it out. However, Duckworth shows that not only can the two coexist, but also, it’s sometimes necessary to quit things if one is to be truly gritty to achieve their higher goals.
Grit is all about perseverance. It’s about working hard. It’s about giving unrelenting effort towards one’s priorities in life. It is about pushing forward through any obstacles that get in the way. And – my favorite aphorism within the book – it’s about falling down seven times but getting up eight.
Duckworth highlights that grit is what turns talent into skill and skill into achievement. Effort counts twice, as she eloquently puts it.
I was a talented kid. I learned new skills quickly, solved problems well, was good with numbers, and excelled at a variety of sports and activities. I generally developed at things more quickly than my peers. As a result, I often received positive feedback from teachers and coaches.
While I grew up with plenty of talent, I don’t think I was particularly gritty. I wasn’t averse to working hard. I just didn’t want to work too hard. I probably fell somewhere in the middle if there were some imaginary grit spectrum.
I tried and stuck with plenty of hard things throughout my childhood. But I also probably gave up somewhat too easily. I probably didn’t always push myself hard enough to be my best self. My talent was generally enough to perform well enough to succeed in most circumstances. That was my mindset through school, through college, and through the early part of my career. And that served me just fine.
Several years back — before the pandemic — I started to feel as if I was hitting a ceiling in multiple areas of life. I no longer felt that I had been progressing. I began to realize that I would need to focus my effort and develop better processes if I were to push through these levels. I needed more grit.
Long before Duckworth wrote her book, I started intuitively changing my behavior. I began experimenting with different habits, slowly adopting many of the ideas she outlines as grit in this book.
I devoted time to becoming a better poker player, studying deliberately and actively improving my strategies.
I focused on performing at a higher and more consistent level at work, and I continued to develop my professional skill set as the data and technology world continued to evolve.
I transformed my nutrition and fitness habits, going from 230 pounds and overweight to 205 pounds and in the best shape of my life.
I started this website as a public project and developed it into a business.
I pushed myself outside of my comfort zone across multiple areas in life. I tried hard things and stuck with them.
I tried to be the best me that I could as often as I could.
According to Duckworth, grit is the factor that can turn common talent into greatness. In a later chapter, she quotes Anson Dorrance, the winningest coach in women’s soccer history. Anson observed that “talent is common; what you invest to develop that talent is the critical final measure of greatness.”
Reading Duckworth’s book has confirmed, in some ways, this mindset that I have tried to develop over the past 6-8 years. It has provided me with formal frameworks and the science to back up what I had already intuited—that any talent alone would not push me over the edge. However, the consistent and unrelenting effort could be the X-factor in helping me achieve further heights and reach more of my goals.
So, how does the book tie into quitting?
Although I said that I had made the decision over the weekend, I had been considering it for the better part of a year.
Solver School was my first solo business. I officially started it in January 2022, but I had been working on it in some form since January 2020, when I started this website. Solver School was a logical next step when I first tried to monetize my work formally.
I saw a potential opportunity. Solvers had started to become more widespread in the poker industry. After ~5 years of rapid adoption, their use had grown from something that a few were doing to an almost mandatory practice that most professionals included in their off-table work. While training sites used solvers as a part of their content to explain poker concepts, there wasn’t much official guidance on how to actually use them as tools properly. This is the problem that Solver School aimed to solve.
Getting the business off the ground was a massive effort. Looking back, I laugh at how naïve I was. I thought it would be simple to get started. When I first had the idea in 2021, I told my wife I could get an initial product with a few modules of content built in a few weeks. It actually took a few months.
After many late evenings of work in my off hours after putting my kids to bed, I finally launched the website and my first product in January 2022. Over the next two years, I continued to expand the course, adding additional modules and downloadable materials.
But by the end of 2023, I was feeling like I was burned out from poker.
The passion that led me to start this website and devote much of 2017-2020 to improving as a poker player had faded significantly. I no longer had the same desire to play, study, coach, or think about the game.
I tried taking time away. I tried playing different forms of poker (NLH, PLO, tournaments, cash, live, online, etc.). I tried different study habits. Nothing seemed to ignite the same spark I once had when I obsessed over the game every day.
I swayed back and forth on the decision of what to do with Solver School multiple times throughout the year. I had leaned towards giving it up several times. But a couple of weeks ago, I decided to give it one final push. I would spend the next few months creating more course content and pair it with a marketing plan this fall.
There’s a chapter early in the book where Duckworth explores an idea for a prioritization exercise to structure goals in a hierarchy. She visualizes it in the form of a tree:
This visualization is, of course, a simplification. If you were to create your own goal tree, it may be much larger than this.
But the idea is that we have a top-level goal that can consist of sub-goals, sub-projects, and sub-tasks.
You may also notice that there is only one goal at the top of the hierarchy. Duckworth believes that we should all have very few top-level goals. Maybe we have a professional one and a non-professional one, but no more than two.
The higher goals in our hierarchies are more abstract, general, and important. “The higher the goal, the more it’s an end in itself, and the less it’s merely a means to an end.”
Duckworth describes this top-level goal as our purpose, and she believes that having this is essential for grit. She likens it to a compass that provides direction and, therefore, meaning to all the goals below it. That description made me smile, reminding me of a post I wrote about purpose earlier this summer, in which I also used the compass metaphor.
Our purpose can consist of multiple goals or projects, each with additional layers of supporting goals or smaller projects or sub-tasks. Depending on the number of levels in the hierarchy, things can get fairly complicated.
The overall idea is that our actions should support our goals above them, but all ultimately work to advance us toward our high-level vision.
Duckworth believes that the grittiest among us have clarity about that vision and what it is. It is the purpose that dominates gritty people’s lives. It’s what they wake up ready to tackle in the morning and think about before they go to bed at night. Gritty people do not give up on their purpose.
But the mid-level and lower-level goals? Those can be changed. Those can be replaced. Those can be paused. Those can be quit. The primary mission is to advance the top-level goal. Everything else is variable.
I started thinking – What is my top-level vision?
I had never taken the time to define it. While I may have intuited it, I never formally considered it or wrote it down. Over the past couple of years, I have started to realize that while poker has a special place in my heart, it is not my highest-level vision, and it is not how I identify myself.
I spent time thinking about my professional vision. I think I need some time to refine this, but here’s what I came up with as an initial draft:
My professional vision is to help others understand complex ideas. To look at problems through the lens of frameworks and logic. To share ways of thinking strategically. To share the wisdom I’ve learned over the years that has helped me to navigate through life.
It’s too long, I know. It needs to be summarized into something I can say in a single sentence. I’ll workshop it and get there. But you can get an idea of the things that I’m interested in doing professionally.
Solver School was once a project that supported that vision. However, my analytics career, my writing on this website, and many of the smaller professional projects that I tackle also support that vision.
With that understanding and formally acknowledging that Solver School was a big thing but not the main thing, I realized that quitting was the logical move. I had reached a natural transition point for the business. I could have either continued to push forward and developed more products. Or I could have moved on, discontinued my support for the company, and sold off its assets. I ultimately chose the latter.
I’m writing this about a week after making the decision. Reflecting on it, I can’t help but laugh at the pace at which things moved. When I opened that book, I never expected to be shutting down Solver School when I finished it. I was expecting to read a book about persevering through adversity. I expected stories about extraordinary people getting back up after falling down and giving everything they have to a purpose. I was ready to be inspired by many of them. It’s nice to come out of reading a book with more clarity about things.
After reading the book, I think I better understand grit and how to apply it in my life. Thus, my plan to leave Solver School makes complete sense, feels logical, and aligns with Duckworth’s true message.
As I continue to refine my vision and work on projects that align with it, I will put everything I have into achieving those goals. Because if there is one thing that I know for sure – I’m as gritty now as I’ve ever been, and that grittiness is continuing to grow (it’s true — Duckworth does show that grittiness grows with age).
Yes, maybe I’ll quit other projects or jobs or tasks along the way. But they will be replaced by new things that are ultimately going to get me closer to that North Star. Solver School is the end of one chapter. But the next one has already begun.
Winding down Solver School will free up some time for me to devote to those other projects. I plan to share general thoughts and ideas on this website as they arise.
You can check out a few of my earlier posts from 2024 here:
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Thanks for reading. I hope that you find your purpose along the way, too. And read Grit – I’m sure you’ll enjoy it!
-Lukich