Annie Duke Quotes

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

Poker teaches that lesson. A great poker player who has a good-size advantage over the other players at the table, making significantly better strategic decisions, will still be losing over 40% of the time at the end of eight hours of play. That's a whole lot of wrong. And it's not just confined to poker.

The endowment effect is a cognitive bias where we value something we own more than we would if we didn't own it. We can be endowed to objects but also to our own ideas and beliefs. Endowment is an obstacle to quitting because when we irrationally value things we own, we miscalculate their expected value. We might think the company we started or the project we devised or the belief we have is worth more than it actually is. We prefer to stick with the status quo. We are more tolerant of bad outcomes that come from sticking with what we are already doing than bad outcomes that come from switching to something new. This phenomenon is part of omission-commission bias. When you say, "I'm just not ready to decide yet," what you are really saying is, "For now, I am choosing the status quo." Even in highly data-rich environments like professional sports, sunk cost, endowment, and status quo bias distort decision-making.

Business journalist and author Suzy Welch developed a popular tool known as 10-10-10 that has the effect of bringing future-us into more of our in-the-moment decisions. "Every 10-10-10 process starts with a question. . . . [W]hat are the consequences of each of my options in ten minutes? In ten months? In ten years?" This set of questions triggers mental time travel that cues that accountability conversation (also encouraged by a truthseeking decision group).

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.

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.

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."

They learned the lesson the ants have down pat: Don't wait to be forced to quit to start exploring alternatives.

Dan Kahan's work on motivated reasoning also indicates that smart people are not better equipped to combat bias — and may even be more susceptible.

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

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

Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future.

It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to and support your beliefs.

When you are weighing whether to quit something or stick with it, you can't know for sure whether you can succeed at what you're doing because that's probabilistic. But there is a crucial difference between the two choices. Only one choice — the choice to persevere — lets you eventually find out the answer.

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.