Annie Duke Quotes

We process outcomes sequentially, treating each outcome as if it stands alone. We don't sit back and wait to update our beliefs until we have enough data to overcome the uncertain relationship between outcomes and decisions.

There's a name for this: Resulting. When people result, they look at whether the result was good or bad to figure out if the decision was good or bad. (Psychologists

Determining whether a decision is good or bad means examining the quality of the beliefs informing the decision, the available options, and how the future might turn out given any choice you make.

As you build things, whether they're train tracks, or bookshelves, or relationships, or essays that you've written for classes, the endowment effect gaffs the scale even more, further escalating our commitment to failing causes.

our brains evolved to create certainty and order. We are uncomfortable with the idea that luck plays a significant role in our lives. We recognize the existence of luck, but we resist the idea that, despite our best efforts, things might not work out the way we want. It feels better for us to imagine the world as an orderly place, where randomness does not wreak havoc and things are perfectly predictable.

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.

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.

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.

this idea of casting yourself into the future, imagining a failure, and then looking back to try to figure out why is called a premortem. Using a premortem is a great tool to help develop high-quality kill criteria.

That we make both types of errors, sometimes sticking too long and sometimes giving up too early, shouldn't be that surprising because whether to stick or quit aren't separate decisions. They are one and the same. Whenever you choose to stick, you are, by definition, not quitting. The reverse is true when you choose to quit.

The actual outcome casts a shadow over your ability to remember what you knew at the time of the decision.

Second, being wrong hurts us more than being right feels good. We know from Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work on loss aversion, part of prospect theory (which won Kahneman the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002), that losses in general feel about two times as bad as wins feel good. So winning $100 at blackjack feels as good to us as losing $50 feels bad to us. Because being right feels like winning and being wrong feels like losing, that means we need two favorable results for every one unfavorable result just to break even emotionally. Why not live a smoother existence, without the swings, especially when the losses affect us more intensely than the wins?

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.

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

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.