Annie Duke Quotes

He considers it his duty to help these founders understand the futility of persevering, so these brilliant people can move on to more worthwhile opportunities. The first obstacle Conway faces is the most obvious one: getting founders to actually recognize that the venture is failing and that it's time for them to walk away. Conway is battling the host of cognitive and motivational forces that make it hard for these entrepreneurs to do that.

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

People didn't even agree on what the terms always and never meant! If you're like most people, you were pretty surprised by these results. Most of us aren't aware of the wide range of what these words mean to different people. We assume that when we use a term, other people use it in the same way we do and mean the same thing we do.

Experience is necessary for learning. But we process that experience in a biased way. This means that the very feedback you need to become a better decision-maker can interfere with your ability to learn good lessons from experience.

A necessary part of becoming a better decision-maker is learning from experience. Experience contains the lessons for improving future decisions. Resulting causes you to learn the wrong lessons.

As you already know, grit is good for getting you to stick to hard things that are worthwhile, but grit also gets you to stick to hard things that are no longer worthwhile.

I'm going to keep developing this product unless I fail to hit clear benchmarks within the next two months that I've set with my quitting coach.

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.

Essentially, regardless of the history they have with the decision, they ask themselves, "If I were approaching this decision fresh, would I want to enter into this course of action?"

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

We are all trying to defend ourselves against how we imagine other people are going to judge us.

The real advice we should give people is more complicated than you can fit in a four-word slogan: Quit while you're ahead . . . when the game you are playing or the path you are on is a losing proposition. If you are in a situation that carries with it a negative expected value, by all means quit. But keep going when you have a positive expected value.

Just as great poker players and chess players (and experts in any field) excel by planning further into the future than others, our decision-making improves when we can more vividly imagine the future, free of the distortions of the present. By working backward from the goal, we plan our decision tree in more depth, because we start at the end.

Here's a secret: All guesses are educated guesses because there is almost no estimate you could make about which you literally know nothing.

But for so many of us, that fear of falling short makes us not want to start. As Richard Thaler quipped, "If a gold medal in the Olympics is the only grade that passes, you do not want to ever take your first gymnastics class."