Quotes from Annie Duke

He considers it his duty to help these founders understand the futility of persevering, so these brilliant people can move on to more worthwhile opportunities. The first obstacle Conway faces is the most obvious one: getting founders to actually recognize that the venture is failing and that it's time for them to walk away. Conway is battling the host of cognitive and motivational forces that make it hard for these entrepreneurs to do that.

Complex and open-minded thought is most likely to be activated when decision makers learn prior to forming any opinions that they will be accountable to an audience (a) whose views are unknown, (b) who is interested in accuracy, (c) who is reasonably well-informed, and (d) who has a legitimate reason for inquiring into the reasons behind participants' judgments/choices.

TED Talk, "The Pursuit of Ignorance.") In the book and the talk, Firestein

We can't just "absorb" experiences and expect to learn. As novelist and philosopher Aldous Huxley recognized, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him." There is a big difference between getting experience and becoming an expert. That difference lies in the ability to identify when the outcomes of our decisions have something to teach us and what that lesson might be.

Quitting on time will usually feel like quitting too early. If you quit on time, it's not going to seem like anything particularly dire is happening at that particular moment. That's because quitting is a problem of being able to glimpse at the range of ways the future might play out and see that the likelihood that things will turn out poorly is too high to make it worth your while to continue.

The challenge is not to change the way our brains operate but to figure out how to work within the limitations of the brains we already have. Being aware of our irrational behavior and wanting to change is not enough, in the same way that knowing that you are looking at a visual illusion is not enough to make the illusion go away.

There is a well-known heuristic in management consulting that the right time to fire someone is the first time it crosses your mind. This heuristic is meant to get businesses to the decision sooner, because most managers are reluctant to terminate personnel, hanging on to them too long.

It's not just that we need to set more flexible goals. We ourselves also need to be more flexible in the way we evaluate success and failure.

Aldous Huxley recognized, "Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

Resulting is the tendency to look at whether a result was good or bad to figure out whether a decision was good or bad.

there are only two things that determine how your life turns out: luck and the quality of your decisions. You have control over only one of those two things.

thinking in bets is not a miracle cure. Thinking in bets won't make self-serving bias disappear or motivated reasoning vanish into thin air. But it will make those things better. And a little bit better is all we need to transform our lives.

So in loose multi-way action games, the math says play tight. In tight games, where the pots are tiny, the math says play loose.

Daniel Gilbert)????????????????????(Stumbling on Happiness,

blaming others for their bad results and failing to give them credit for their good ones is under the influence of ego.

there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck.

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

In the short-term, for any single decision, there is only a loose relationship between the quality of the decision and the quality of the outcome. The two are correlated, but the relationship can take a long time to play out.

You can't tell that much about the quality of a decision from a single outcome, because of luck. When you make a decision, you can rarely guarantee a good outcome (or a bad one). Instead, the goal is to try to choose the option that will lead to the most favorable range of outcomes.

As with all the strategies in this book, we must recognize that no strategy can turn us into perfectly rational actors. In addition, we can make the best possible decisions and still not get the result we want.

When we make in-the-moment decisions (and don't ponder the past or future), we are more likely to be irrational and impulsive.* This tendency we all have to favor our present-self at the expense of our future-self is called temporal discounting.

There are many possible futures, but only one past. This makes the past feel inevitable, as even the tiniest of twigs now looks like the thickest of branches because it's the only thing you can see.

Even when your owner is Alphabet, you have limited resources of time, money, and attention. What that means is Teller has to identify the projects that aren't going to pan out as quickly as possible. To pursue radical ideas, he has to be a radical loss-cutter. Every dollar they save by getting to no quickly is a dollar they can spend on something that could change the world.

Teller realizes that when you're building pedestals, you are also accumulating sunk costs that make it hard to quit even as you find out that you may not be able to train the monkey to juggle those torches.