This is Part 3 in a seven-part series about world poker champion and cognitive scientist Annie Duke, Ph.D., whose insights follow each question below. To read from the start of the series, see Part 1.

Jenny Grant Rankin: I love that you touch on cognitive dissonance, that mental discomfort at play when the thought of luck playing a role in our successes conflicts with our desire to think positively about ourselves. When we push through that discomfort and are able to accept unflattering truths, research shows we actually report being happier on that other side.

Annie Duke: Exactly. It's just better when we accept the role that luck plays. It will help our future decisions, too.

JGR: An important point from your books is that people tend to quit unworthy endeavors too late. Why is that?

AD: There are a lot of reasons. When we think about the work of Danny Kahneman and others on cognitive biases, a whole bunch of them could really be described as biases against stopping things. The most famous of them is the sunk cost fallacy, which is that we take into account the resources that we've put into something when deciding........

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