Quotes from Annie Duke

Deciding which hands are worth playing and which hands are not is the first and most consequential choice a player makes. And pros are just better at that choice, playing a mere 15% to 25% of the two-card starting combinations they are dealt in Texas Hold'em. Compare that to an amateur, who will stick with their starting cards over half the time. In the battle of whether to hold 'em or fold 'em, amateurs usually hold 'em. Professionals usually fold 'em.

In order to become a better decision-maker, it's imperative to actively explore all four of the ways that decision quality and outcome quality relate to each other.

might have been absurd, but I was making the point that a necessary part of succeeding in poker is to fold some hands that might have won. To be good at the game you just have to learn to live with that. Playing every hand you are dealt is an easy and fast way to go broke since you would be playing too many hands that aren't profitable in the long run.

Our problem is that we're ticker watchers of our own lives. Happiness (however we individually define it) is not best measured by looking at the ticker, zooming in and magnifying moment-by-moment or day-by-day movements. We would be better off thinking about our happiness as a long-term stock holding. We would do well to view our happiness through a wide-angle lens, striving for a long, sustaining upward trend in our happiness stock, so it resembles the first Berkshire Hathaway chart.

But the goals we set are remarkably unresponsive to new information.

Small changes in how much you notice the luck that you would otherwise overlook will have a big influence on the way your life turns out. Those small changes act like compounding interest that pays big dividends on your future decision-making.

Natural language terms that express likelihoods, like "very likely" and "unlikely," are useful but blunt instruments. The drive to improve on your initial estimates is what motivates you to check your information and learn more. If you hide behind the safety of a general term, there's no reason to improve on it or calibrate

Terms that express likelihoods mean very different things to different people. Using ambiguous terms can lead to confusion and miscommunication with people you want to engage for help. Being more precise, by expressing probabilities as percentages, makes it more likely you'll uncover information that can correct inaccuracies in your beliefs and broaden your knowledge.

In addition to making precise (bull's-eye) estimates, offer a range around that estimate to express your uncertainty. Do this by including a lower and upper bound that communicate the size of your target.

Even when you make a good decision, that doesn't mean that it was the best decision. In fact, it rarely is. Striving to improve means being willing to fight the complacency that can come from a good decision leading to a good result.

When it comes to quitting, the most painful thing to quit is who you are.

Quitting on time usually feels like quitting too early, and the usually part is specifically when you're in the losses.

In every domain, the outcome tail is wagging the decision dog.

The endowment effect helps unlock the mystery of why Harold Staw twice would not sell his stores. In his battle with the Texas shareholders, in which his good friend and lawyer defected to the other side, he was endowed to the California stores in a way that those on the other side of the suit were not. He was unwilling to sell the California stores, stores he had created and built, to protect the value of the Texas stores, stores he had not created and built.

The size of the range signals what you know and what you don't know. The larger the range, the less information or the lower the quality of the information informing your estimate, and the more you need to learn. Communicating the size of the range also signals to others that you need their knowledge and perspective to narrow the range.

The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them.

But there is one aphorism that actually encourages people to quit: Quit while you're ahead. Just as so many of those inspirational quotes lauding unlimited persistence are bad advice, this single piece of pro-quitting wisdom, despite surviving for more than four hundred years, is no better.

The goal becomes fixed even as all the inputs that led to choosing that particular goal evolve. The conditions in the world change. Our knowledge changes. The weights we attach to the benefits and costs change. Our preferences and values change.

It doesn't so much matter where we end up as how we got there. What has happened in the recent past drives our emotional response much more than how we are doing overall. That's how we can win $100 and be sad, and lose $100 and be happy.

As you build things, whether they're train tracks, or bookshelves, or relationships, or essays that you've written for classes, the endowment effect gaffs the scale even more, further escalating our commitment to failing causes.

eight times more people die on Everest on the way down than on the way up.

The real advice we should give people is more complicated than you can fit in a four-word slogan: Quit while you're ahead . . . when the game you are playing or the path you are on is a losing proposition. If you are in a situation that carries with it a negative expected value, by all means quit. But keep going when you have a positive expected value.

As these things change, if we were to rerun the cost-benefit analysis, the output would surely be different. But we don't rerun it.

I can say that Nick the Greek lost a lot of money based on his beliefs—or, more accurately, because he ignored lots of feedback that his strategy was a losing one. He eventually went broke because he didn't recognize learning opportunities as they arose.