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Annie Duke QUOTES

Annie Duke QUOTES

1 " If you had a navigation app for your goals and decisions, it would work like a premortem and a backcast and its output would look like the Decision Exploration Table. You’ve identified two broad categories of future events (those within and outside your control) that could decrease or increase your chances of failure or success and made an educated guess about their likelihood. You now have a good map of what might lie in the path on the way to your goal. "

― Annie Duke , How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

2 " An accurate picture of the odds is important when you’re choosing a path. But once you’ve already made your choice, then you should switch into irrational optimism for the execution phase. "

― Annie Duke , How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

3 " Whenever we choose an alternative (whether it is taking a new job or moving to Des Moines for month), we are automatically rejecting every other possible choice. All those rejected alternatives are paths to possible futures where things could be better or worse than the path we chose. There is potential opportunity cost in any choice we forgo. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

4 " There is always opportunity cost in choosing one path over others. The betting elements of decisions—choice, probability, risk, etc.—are more obvious in some situations than others. Investments are clearly bets. A decision about a stock (buy, don’t buy, sell, hold, not to mention esoteric investment options) involves a choice about the best use of financial resources. Incomplete information and factors outside of our control make all our investment choices uncertain. We evaluate what we can, figure out what we think will maximize our investment money, and execute. Deciding not to invest or not to sell a stock, likewise, is a bet. These are the same decisions I make during a hand of poker: fold, check, call, bet, or raise. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

5 " For any single decision, there are different ways the future could unfold—some better, some worse. When you make a decision, the decision makes certain paths possible (even if you don’t know where they lead) and others impossible. The decision you make determines which set of outcomes are possible and how likely each of those outcomes is. But it doesn’t determine which of that set of outcomes will actually happen. "

― Annie Duke , How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

6 " Luck exerts its influence between your decision and which of the possible paths you end up on. It is the element you have no control over that determines which of the possible outcomes you actually observe in the short run. "

― Annie Duke , How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

7 " What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

8 " In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

9 " Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of good outcomes, not guaranteeing them. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

10 " Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

11 " Even research communities of highly intelligent and well-meaning individuals can fall prey to confirmation bias, as IQ is positively correlated with the number of reasons people find to support their own side in an argument "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

12 " Despite the popular wisdom that we achieve success through positive visualization, it turns out that incorporating negative visualization makes us more likely to achieve our goals. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

13 " The secret is to make peace with walking around in a world where we recognize that we are not sure and that’s okay. As we learn more about how our brains operate, we recognize that we don’t perceive the world objectively. But our goal should be to try. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

14 " frame: the smarter you are, the better you are at constructing a narrative that supports your beliefs, rationalizing and framing the data to fit your argument or point of view. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

15 " We might think of ourselves as open-minded and capable of updating our beliefs based on new information, but the research conclusively shows otherwise. Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite, altering our interpretation of that information to fit our beliefs. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

16 " Outcomes don’t tell us what’s our fault and what isn’t, what we should take credit for and what we shouldn’t. Unlike in chess, we can’t simply work backward from the quality of the outcome to determine the quality of our beliefs or decisions. This makes learning from outcomes a pretty haphazard process. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

17 " As with visual illusions, we can’t make our minds work differently than they do no matter how smart we are. Just as we can’t unsee an illusion, intellect or willpower alone can’t make us resist motivated reasoning. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

18 " Truthseeking, the desire to know the truth regardless of whether the truth aligns with the beliefs we currently hold, is not naturally supported by the way we process information. We might think of ourselves as open-minded and capable of updating our beliefs based on new information, but the research conclusively shows otherwise. Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite, altering our interpretation of that information to fit our beliefs. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

19 " We behave according to what we bring to the occasion.” Our beliefs affect how we process all new things, “whether the ‘thing’ is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

20 " Chess, for all its strategic complexity, isn’t a great model for decision-making in life, where most of our decisions involve hidden information and a much greater influence of luck. "

― Annie Duke , Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts