Quotes from Annie Duke

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.

In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.

Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of good outcomes, not guaranteeing them.

Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.

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

Despite the popular wisdom that we achieve success through positive visualization, it turns out that incorporating negative visualization makes us more likely to achieve our goals.

The secret is to make peace with walking around in a world where we recognize that we are not sure and that's okay. As we learn more about how our brains operate, we recognize that we don't perceive the world objectively. But our goal should be to try.

Outcomes don't tell us what's our fault and what isn't, what we should take credit for and what we shouldn't. Unlike in chess, we can't simply work backward from the quality of the outcome to determine the quality of our beliefs or decisions. This makes learning from outcomes a pretty haphazard process.

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.

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.

Chess, for all its strategic complexity, isn't a great model for decision-making in life, where most of our decisions involve hidden information and a much greater influence of luck.

Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. Treating decisions as bets, I discovered, helped me avoid common decision traps, learn from results in a more rational way, and keep emotions out of the process as much as possible.

When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call.

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.

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.

As with visual illusions, we can't make our minds work differently than they do no matter how smart we are. Just as we can't unsee an illusion, intellect or willpower alone can't make us resist motivated reasoning.

When someone asks you about a coin they flipped four times, there is a correct answer: "I'm not sure.

Identifying a negative outcome doesn't have the same personal sting if you turn it into a positive by finding things to learn from it. You don't have to be on the defensive side of every negative outcome because you can recognize, in addition to things you can improve, things you did well and things outside your control. You realize that not knowing is okay.

not all situations are appropriate for truthseeking, nor are all people interested in the pursuit.

In large part, we are what we do, and our identity is closely connected with whatever we're focused on, including our careers, relationships, projects, and hobbies. When we quit any of those things, we have to deal with the prospect of quitting part of our identity. And that is painful.

We behave according to what we bring to the occasion." Our beliefs affect how we process all new things, "whether the 'thing' is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach.

Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.

If you feel like you've got a close call between quitting and persevering, it's likely that quitting is the better choice.

Forcing ourselves to express how sure we are of our beliefs brings to plain sight the probabilistic nature of those beliefs, that what we believe is almost never 100% or 0% accurate but, rather, somewhere in between.