Professional Documents
Culture Documents
BY
ANNIE DUKE
my notes
A bet is a decision about an uncertain future.
Two things determine how your life turns out: the quality of your
decisions, and luck. Recognize the difference between the two.
When a decision doesn’t work out, don't treat that result as if it were
an inevitable consequence rather than a probabilistic one. Don't
focus only on the poor outcome.
“Real games”:
Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking
yourself what is the other person going to think I mean to do.
The decisions you make in your life - in business, saving and
spending, health and lifestyle choices, raising your children, and
relationships - are “real games”.
Life is not like chess. Chess contains no hidden information and very
little luck.
Life is more like poker. You could make the smartest, most careful
decision and still have it blow up in your face.
Good decision-makers try to figure out how unsure they are, making
their best guess at the chances that different outcomes will occur.
When you think probabilistically, you are less likely to use adverse
results alone as proof that you made a decision error, because you
recognize the possibility that the decision might have been good but
luck and/or incomplete information (and a sample size of one)
intervened.
Making better decisions is not about being wrong or right, but about
calibrating among all the shades of grey.
Being smart can actually make bias worse. Blind-spot bias is worse
the smarter you are.
Being smart and aware of your capacity for irrationality alone doesn’t
help you refrain from biased reasoning.
You are wired to protect your beliefs even when your goal is to
truthseek.
What if, in addition to expressing what you believe, you also rated
your level of confidence about the accuracy of your belief on a scale
of zero to ten?
“I’m 60% confident that Citizen Kane won best picture” reflects that
your knowledge is incomplete.
You can express how confident you are by thinking about the
number of plausible alternatives and declaring that range.
The less you know about a topic or the more luck involved, the wider
your range.
Any decision is a bet on what will likely create the most favorable
future for you.
The future you have bet on unfolds as a series of outcomes.
Why did something happen the way it did? Bet on how you figure
out what you should learn from an outcome.
If you determine your decisions drove the outcome, you can feed the
data you get following those decisions back into belief formation and
updating, creating a learning loop.
The challenge is that any single outcome can happen for multiple
reasons.
The way you field outcomes is predictably patterned: you take credit
for the good stuff and blame the bad stuff on luck so it won’t be your
fault. The result is that you don’t learn from experience well. “Self-
serving bias” is the term
Blaming the bulk of your bad outcomes on luck means you miss
opportunities to examine your decisions to see where you can do
better. Taking credit for the good stuff means you will often
reinforce decisions that shouldn’t be reinforced and miss
opportunities to see where you could have done better.
If someone you view as a peer is winning, you feel like you’re losing
by comparison. You benchmark yourself to them.
To change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old
reward, but insert a new routine.
It’s easy to win a bet against someone who takes extreme positions.
Other people can spot your errors better than you can.
People are more willing to offer their opinion when the goal is to win
a bet rather than get along with people in a room.
When you think about the past and the future, you engage
deliberative mind, improving your ability to make a more rational
decision.
If regret occurred before a decision instead of after, the experience
of regret might get you to change a choice likely to result in a bad
outcome.
You’re already making a prediction about the future every time you
make a decision, so you’re better off if you make that explicit.
Imagine yourself looking back from the destination and figure how
you got there.
Remembering the future is a better way to plan for it.
Your decision-making improves when you can more vividly imagine
the future, free of the distortions of the present.