Travel from Hell
Monday, August 24, 2009 - Annie Duke
I headed off on Wednesday of last week to go to Adventures of the Mind, an amazing mentoring summit. The program brings together 150 of the smartest high school students in the country with mentors who have gotten to the top of their respective fields. The summit was held at The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. I found myself in a room with 9 Nobel prize winners, the founder of Twitter, the head of Mozilla and John Nash (just to name a few of the mentors). I was honored to be in the same room with such great minds including 9 Nobel Prize Winners. Even cooler for me was that IAS was the place where John von Neumann was a professor. I speak of von Neumann several times a year in my poker seminars as he was the father of Game Theory. Any poker player should revere von Neumann and I got to walk the very paths that von Neumann walked. Oh, and Einstein walked those same paths too. He was appointed to the IAS in 1933 at a salary of $15,000 a year which was a buttload of money back then. Freaking amazing experience for me.
Anyway, getting to Adventures of the Mind was pretty harrowing (as was getting home). I planned to take an 11:30 pm flight on Continental out of LAX. I got there and the flight was delayed an hour which turned into 2 hours because flights before mine were already stacked up late. When we finally got on the plane it was already 1:30 in the morning and I was exhausted so as we starting taxiing to the runway I fell asleep. Pretty quickly I was woken up by an announcement that we were taxiing to the gate. At first I thought that I had gone out hard and clearly slept through the whole flight. To my dismay, though, I realized we hadn’t even taken off yet when the rest of the announcement said we had to go back to remove a woman from the plane. That would be a DRUNK woman from the plane who had gotten up and walked to the bathroom during takeoff to throw up! I am not kidding here.
So I was up front in business class so I got to eavesdrop on everything that was going on. We got back to the gate and the maintenance people had already gone home so we had to sit there for a over 15 minutes while they found a maintenance person to open the door of the plane. The whole time this drunk lady and her friend were complaining about how they didn’t understand why they had to be removed from the plane. Didn’t the flight attendant think they had already been embarrassed enough? The answer to that was, “No!” No one told them that they could get up and walk around the plane during taxi and takeoff! Okay…aside from the fact that the flight attendants made their normal safety announcements as we were leaving the gate and I would have to ask, “What the hell planet do you women live on? Everyone knows you can’t get out of your seat during taxi and take off.” Oh, and the final complaint of these women was, “Don’t you know you are ruining our weekend?” The answer to that was, “It’s Wednesday.” I thought that was pretty funny. My own personal answer was that they were doing a pretty good job of ruining my day.
So they finally remove these women from the plane. As a side note the one who threw up claimed to have only had two glasses of wine. I’ll take the over on that one. Anyway, they find the maintenance people who now have to clean the bathroom this woman has thrown up in. Apparently, she didn’t throw up in the toilet but in the sick. Now I am sure everyone has seen a plane’s bathroom sink and it is tiny so the whole thing was clogged with some nasty, chunky throw up. I felt pretty bad for the maintenance worker with that one. It took her about 15 minutes to clean that gross puke up. Ew!
Okay, so finally around 2 am we head toward the runway again and I arrive in Princeton almost three hours late. Thanks drunk lady! You made my day!
So I spent the next two days at The Institute for Advanced Study. I listened to some amazing spoken word artists, heard the story of how Captchas, those distorted words you have to type on the internet to prove you are a human, are now being used to digitize books. Check out http://www.recaptcha.net to find out about that. And Luis von Ahn who is the brains behind that operation (and an amazing speaker I might add). I got to hear from the president of Rhode Island School of Design, here the founder of Pixar speak and also hear from the inventor of the Ultima series of games. And that was just a sampling of the great minds I had access too. It was incredible to see these high school students enrapt by the speakers. Knowing that I was a part of an experience that will stay with these high school students their whole lives and have such a deep impact on them (it definitely had a deep impact on me).
My talk to the students was about how I found my way into poker which was really just a message about understanding that just because you are really good at something does not mean that it is what you are meant to be doing because no matter how good you are if it doesn’t light you up inside it is not the path you are meant to take, no matter how many mentors have invested time in that path or the obligations you feel towards them. In my case, I was very good at the academic path I had chosen as a young woman. I had gone to an Ivy League college, and Ivy League grad school. I had secured a very prestigious National Science Foundation Fellowship to go to grad school. My mentors and advisors had put a tremendous amount of time and effort into me and my education. And, frankly, I was a very good scientist.
But when it came down to it the only thing that was keeping down that path was a fear of failing my mentors and my parents. Had I not had the guts to leave I would never have gone down the poker path, a path that I have true passion for. A path that lights me up inside. And had I not had the guts to leave, I might never have founded Ante Up for Africa, or found my way to the board of Decision Education Foundation. I might never had the platform to accomplish the humanitarian efforts that have already been so important to me. So it all came together in the right way for me because I realized that, in the end, the only way you fail your mentors is by failing to fulfill your potential by finding the thing that makes you happiest.
So that was my message to the students. I mean it wasn’t like I could talk about my Nobel Prize winning research like some of the other speakers! I left on Friday, thinking I was going to play The Bike tournament. And my flight was delayed 4 hours. I have been having horrible luck with travel lately. By the time I finally got home to LA I didn’t get to sleep until almost 6 am so I was too exhausted to even play The Bike. I wish I had known because I certainly would have stayed an extra day at the summit. All around, the return flight being delayed really screwed my. But hey, at least there wasn’t a drunk lady on that flight. Way to go Continental!
Tags: Adventures of the Mind, Ante Up For Africa, Einstein, Game Theory, Institute of Advanced Study, John von Neumann, Mozilla, Nobel Prize, Pixar, Princeton, Twitter
