Annie Duke QUOTES

21 " Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. Treating decisions as bets, I discovered, helped me avoid common decision traps, learn from results in a more rational way, and keep emotions out of the process as much as possible. "

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

22 " The decisions we make in our lives—in business, saving and spending, health and lifestyle choices, raising our children, and relationships—easily fit von Neumann’s definition of “real games.” They involve uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception, prominent elements in poker. Trouble follows when we treat life decisions as if they were chess decisions. "

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

23 " When someone asks you about a coin they flipped four times, there is a correct answer: “I’m not sure. "

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

24 " Identifying a negative outcome doesn’t have the same personal sting if you turn it into a positive by finding things to learn from it. You don’t have to be on the defensive side of every negative outcome because you can recognize, in addition to things you can improve, things you did well and things outside your control. You realize that not knowing is okay. "

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

25 " Forcing ourselves to express how sure we are of our beliefs brings to plain sight the probabilistic nature of those beliefs, that what we believe is almost never 100% or 0% accurate but, rather, somewhere in between. "

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

26 " When we work toward belief calibration, we become less judgmental of ourselves. "

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

27 " not all situations are appropriate for truthseeking, nor are all people interested in the pursuit. "

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

28 " Barry Schwartz points out in his book, The Paradox of Choice, that this kind of sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing decision is more likely to come up the more options you have to choose from. The greater the number of available options, the greater the likelihood that more than one of those options will look pretty good to you. The more options that look pretty good to you, the more time you spend in analysis paralysis. That’s the paradox: more choice, more anxiety. Remember, if the only choices are between Paris and a trout cannery, no one has a problem. But what if the choices are Paris or Rome or Amsterdam or Santorini or Machu Picchu? You get the picture. THE ONLY-OPTION TEST For any options you’re considering, ask yourself, “If this were the only option I had, would I be happy with it?” A useful tool you can use to break the gridlock is the Only-Option Test. If this were the only thing I could order on the menu . . . If this were the only show I could watch on Netflix tonight . . . If this were the only place I could go for vacation . . . If this were the only college I got accepted to . . . If this were the only house I could buy . . . If this were the only job I got offered . . . The Only-Option Test clears away the debris cluttering your decision. If you’d be happy if Paris were your only option, and you’d be happy if Rome were your only option, that reveals that if you just flip a coin, you’ll be happy whichever way the coin lands. "

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

29 " Making better decisions starts with understanding this: uncertainty can work a lot of mischief. "

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

30 " The promise of this book is that if we follow the example of poker players by making explicit that our decisions are bets, we can make better decisions and anticipate (and take protective measures) when irrationality is likely to keep us from acting in our best interest. "

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

31 " Self-serving bias has immediate and obvious consequences for our ability to learn from experience. "

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

32 " Why might my belief not be true? What other evidence might be out there bearing on my belief? Are there similar areas I can look toward to gauge whether similar beliefs to mine are true? What sources of information could I have missed or minimized on the way to reaching my belief? What are the reasons someone else could have a different belief, what’s their support, and why might they be right instead of me? What other perspectives are there as to why things turned out the way they did? "

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

33 " Incorporating uncertainty into the way we think about our beliefs comes with many benefits. By expressing our level of confidence in what we believe, we are shifting our approach to how we view the world. Acknowledging uncertainty is the first step in measuring and narrowing it. Incorporating uncertainty in the way we think about what we believe creates open-mindedness, moving us closer to a more objective stance toward information that disagrees with us. "

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

34 " If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth. "

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

35 " There are many reasons why wrapping our arms around uncertainty and giving it a big hug will help us become better decision-makers. Here are two of them. First, “I’m not sure” is simply a more accurate representation of the world. Second, and related, when we accept that we can’t be sure, we are less likely to fall into the trap of black-and-white thinking. "

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

36 " Certainly, in exchange for losing the fear of taking blame for bad outcomes, you also lose the unadulterated high of claiming good outcomes were 100% skill. That’s a trade you should take. Remember, losing feels about twice as bad as winning feels good; being wrong feels about twice as bad as being right feels good. We are in a better place when we don’t have to live at the edges. Euphoria or misery, with no choices in between, is not a very self-compassionate way to live. "

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

37 " The same thing happened after Donald Trump won the presidency. There was a huge outcry about the polls being wrong. Nate Silver, the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com, drew a lot of that criticism. But he never said Clinton was a sure thing. Based on his aggregation and weighting of polling data, he had Trump between 30% and 40% to win (approximately between two-to-one and three-to-two against) in the week before the election. An event predicted to happen 30% to 40% of the time will happen a lot. "

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

38 " Third, ask for a temporary agreement to engage in truthseeking. If someone is off-loading emotion to us, we can ask them if they are just looking to vent or if they are looking for advice. If they aren’t looking for advice, that’s fine. The rules of engagement have been made clear. Sometimes, people just want to vent. I certainly do. It’s in our nature. We want to be supportive of the people around us, and that includes comforting them when they just need some understanding and sympathy. But sometimes they’ll say they are looking for advice, and that is potentially an agreement to opt in to some truthseeking. (Even then, tread lightly because people may say they want advice when what they really want is to be affirmed.) "

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

39 " Whether it is the forming of a group of friends or a pod at work—or hiring for diversity of viewpoint and tolerance for dissent when you are able to guide an enterprise’s culture toward accuracy—we should guard against gravitating toward clones of ourselves. We should also recognize that it’s really hard: the norm is toward homogeneity; we’re all guilty of it; and we don’t even notice that we’re doing it. "

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

40 " Poker players live in a world where that risk is made explicit. They can get comfortable with uncertainty because they put it up front in their decisions. Ignoring the risk and uncertainty in every decision might make us feel better in the short run, but the cost to the quality of our decision-making can be immense. If we can find ways to become more comfortable with uncertainty, we can see the world more accurately and be better for it. "

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