To figure out whether a decision is good or bad, you need to know not just the things that might reasonably happen and what could be gained or lost, … - Annie Duke

A higher chance of failing is more tolerated on paths that don't rock the boat. After all, what's the go-to defense in a postmortem after we make a decision that doesn't work out? "I followed procedure," or "I stuck with the status quo," or "I made the consensus choice."

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.

Goals can make it possible to achieve worthwhile things, but goals can also increase the chances that we will escalate commitment when we should quit. Goals are pass-fail in nature. You either reach the finish line or you don't, and progress along the way matters very little. Don't just measure whether you hit the goal, ask what you have achieved and learned along the way. Set intermediate goals and prioritize goals that allow you to recognize progress along the way or acquire something valuable even if you don't reach the goal. Goals, when set, are a proxy for an expected-value equation, balancing the benefits that you're trying to gain against the costs you're willing to bear. Inflexible goals aren't a good fit for a flexible world. With better advance planning (like identifying monkeys and pedestals and kill criteria) and the help of a good quitting coach, you can make goals more flexible, setting at least one "unless" and planning regular check-ins on the analysis that initially led to setting the goal. In general, when we quit, we fear two things: that we've failed and that we've wasted our time, effort, or money. Waste is a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS