Weekend after weekend, Manjul Gupta noticed the same patterns play out on the pickleball court. Some players shrugged off their mistakes and moved on. Others tried to replay every shot they missed. Some organized the games or friendly tournaments, while others checked on injured players and some disappeared as soon as play ended.
Those observations eventually became PQ-7: You Against Yourself: What Pickleball Reveals About Who You Really Are, a book that uses pickleball as a lens to explore resilience, self-awareness, friendship and personal growth. It’s a departure from Gupta’s years of academic research studying information systems and artificial intelligence, but one he says grew from the same curiosity that has shaped his academic career.
“I’ve spent my career trying to understand human behavior,” Gupta said. “This was about taking those observations and sharing them in a way that anyone, not just researchers, can connect with. How you play on the court mirrors how you operate in life”
Gupta, the Ryder Eminent Scholar Chair in Management Information Systems and doctoral director of the Information Systems and Business Analytics Ph.D. program at FIU Business, has built a career publishing research for scholarly audiences in some of the most distinguished academic journals. His work has been cited thousands of times, helping organizations better understand human behavior, decision-making and the role of emerging technologies including AI.
Writing for a general audience required an entirely different mindset.
"As business scholars, we have a responsibility to ensure our work reaches beyond journals and into the hands of people who can actually use it," he said.
Rather than presenting readers with research findings or theoretical models, Gupta built the book around composite characters drawn from years of observing recreational athletes. Each chapter explores one of seven dimensions that make up the PQ-7 framework: Drive IQ, Heart IQ, Game IQ, Recovery IQ, Joy IQ, Post-Game IQ and Camaraderie IQ, making the academic language more relatable.
The framework began taking shape long before Gupta ever sat down to write. An avid golfer and father of a competitive junior golfer, he had spent years thinking about what keeps people returning to sports that demand time, discipline and resilience even when winning isn’t the primary motivation. Pickleball, with its rapidly growing community and emphasis on social connection, offered the perfect setting to explore those ideas.
Colleagues encouraged him to resist writing another academic publication.
“They said,” don’t write for academics,” Gupta recalled. “Write something people will actually enjoy reading.”
That advice shaped nearly every decision that followed. Gupta wrote in the first person, swapped theory for storytelling and intentionally avoided positioning the book as a scholarly text. While the concepts draw on decades of studying behavior, he describes the work as observational rather than empirical and hopes readers can see themselves in the stories, regardless of whether they’ve ever picked up a paddle.
The result, he says, isn’t really about pickleball at all.
“It’s about who you become through the things you choose to keep showing up for.”