'Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt' star Ellie Kemper on why it's okay to be a quitter

Ellie Kemper, star of Netflix’s (NFLX) “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” has some surprising career (and life) advice: It’s okay to quit. Really.

“I know that we are supposed to tell our younger children to go for it and to pursue their dreams and to never give up. But I do want to add the caveat: that it is okay to quit,” she said on Yahoo Finance’s My Three Cents with Jen Rogers.

“And we don't need to call it quitting. We can call it going in a different direction.”

Kemper went in a different direction back in college, when she chose to quit the Princeton University field hockey team and pursue a newly found passion: improv.

“I was warming the bench. I was literally a practice dummy. I believe my coach called me that once,” Kemper said, laughing. “So when you are a practice dummy, and you feel like ‘I only have four years at college, I maybe want to be doing something else where I'm making more of my time.’”

Kemper joined the Princeton improv comedy team, Quipfire!, where she began to hone the skills she would later bring to her stand-out roles in “The Office,” “Bridesmaids” and “The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”

“I really do feel if I hadn't quit the field hockey team then I wouldn't have joined this, she said. “I wouldn’t have pursued this other thing. So I do think it was a smart move.”

Jen Rogers is the anchor of “The Final Round” on Yahoo Finance and the host of its show My Three Cents which interviews celebrities about the role of money in their everyday lives.

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