Annie Duke Quotes

By not quitting, you are missing out on the opportunity to switch to something that will create more progress toward your goals. Anytime you stay mired in a losing endeavor, that is when you are slowing your progress. Anytime you stick to something when there are better opportunities out there, that is when you are slowing your progress.

When you overfit decision quality to outcome quality, you risk repeating decision errors that, thanks to luck, preceded a good outcome. You may also avoid repeating good decisions that, because of luck, didn't work out.

And the effect is stronger the more the ticket costs. Imagine if, instead of $95, you had spent $150 or $250 or $500. As the price tag grows, so does the effect of sunk costs.

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.

Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress.

Silicon Valley is famous for mantras like "move fast and break things" and implementing them through strategies like "minimum viable product" (MVP). These types of agile strategies can only work if you have the option to quit. You can't put out an MVP unless you have the ability to pull it back. The whole point is to get information quickly, so you can quit the stuff that isn't working and stick with the things that are worthwhile or develop new things that might work even better.

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.

When we identify the goal and work backward from there to "remember" how we got there, the research shows that we do better. In a Harvard Business Review article, decision scientist Gary Klein summarized the results of a 1989 experiment by Deborah Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington. They "found that prospective hindsight — imagining that an event has already occurred — increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%."

A lot of experience can be an excellent teacher. A single experience, not so much. Looking across a large enough set of decisions and outcomes, we can start to tease out the lessons experience might offer us. Looking at just one outcome, we get resulting and hindsight bias.

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

What if we shifted our definition of "I don't know" from the negative frame ("I have no idea" or "I know nothing about that," which feels like we lack competence or confidence) to a more neutral frame? What if we thought about it as recognizing that, although we might know something about the chances of some event occurring, we are still not sure how things will turn out in any given instance? That is just the truth. If we accept that, "I'm not sure" might not feel so bad. What good poker players and good decision-makers have in common is their comfort with the world being an uncertain and unpredictable place.

Luck is what intervenes between your decision (which has a range of possible outcomes) and the outcome that you actually get. Because any decision determines only the set of possible outcomes (some good, some bad, some in between), this means good outcomes can result from both good and bad

When people result, they look at whether the result was good or bad to figure out if the decision was good or bad.

One of Teller's valuable insights is that pedestal-building creates the illusion of progress rather than actual progress itself.

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