Quotes from Annie Duke

An obvious and high-value application of kill criteria has to do with funnel management for a business's sales function. A big problem for sellers is managing all the opportunities at the top of the funnel: Which do you pursue? And, once you've started pursuing a lead, when do you give up on it?

Astro Teller also understands a subtler but no less important point, that we have a tendency, when we butt up against a monkey that is proving difficult to solve, to turn our attention to building pedestals rather than giving up. We prefer that illusion of progress to having to quit and admit defeat.

All these famous people, and countless others, have united behind variations of the expression "Quitters never win, and winners never quit.

Backcasting and premortems complement each other. Backcasting imagines a positive future; a premortem imagines a negative future. We can't create a complete picture without representing both the positive space and the negative space. Backcasting reveals the positive space. Premortems reveal the negative space. Backcasting is the cheerleader; a premortem is the heckler in the audience.

Essentially, kill criteria create a precommitment contract to quit.

quoting an August 2005 speech by then president George W. Bush justifying staying the course in Iraq by saying, "We owe [the two thousand soldiers who had already died] something. We will finish the task that they gave their lives for."); Van Putten, Zeelenberg, and Van Dijk, "Who Throws Good Money after Bad?," 2010, 33 ("one of the most important reasons to continue the way in Iraq was to prevent acknowledging that soldiers who fell in battle died in vain").

Hindsight bias adds to the ruckus caused by knowing the outcome, distorting your memory of what you knew at the time of the decision in two ways: You did know what was going to happen—swapping out your actual view at the time of the decision with a faulty memory of that view to conform to your postoutcome knowledge. You should (or could) have known what was going to happen—to the point of predictability or inevitability.

But omission-commission bias causes us not to view these decisions as equivalent. That's why we accept that explanation of "I'm not ready to make a decision yet" from others and why we accept it from ourselves. Of course, what that really means is "I'm not ready to veer from the status quo.

Memory creep is the reconstruction of your memory of what you knew that hindsight bias creates.

The next time that you find yourself saying, "I'm just not ready to decide yet," what you should actually say is "For now I think that the status quo is still the best choice." Maybe you need more information to know whether to switch. But what shouldn't stop you from quitting (or getting that information) is that it's too scary to switch because loss aversion is too intense.

Most of what we do daily exists in automatic processing. We have habits and defaults that we rarely examine, from gripping a pencil to swerving to avoid an auto accident. 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.

Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future.

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.

It doesn't take much for any of us to believe something. And once we believe it, protecting that belief guides how we treat further information relevant to the belief.

Whether it is a football game, a protest, or just about anything else, our pre-existing beliefs influence the way we experience the world. That those beliefs aren't formed in a particularly orderly way leads to all sorts of mischief in our decision-making.

This irrational, circular information-processing pattern is called motivated reasoning. The way we process new information is driven by the beliefs we hold, strengthening them. Those strengthened beliefs then drive how we process further information, and so on.

Dan Kahan's work on motivated reasoning also indicates that smart people are not better equipped to combat bias—and may even be more susceptible.

By asking her if she would be happier in the new job more than 0% of the time, that helped her see that there was some certainty in changing jobs. Specifically, she had a better chance of getting to where she wanted to go faster if she switched. In that moment, she realized the devil that she didn't know was the better choice.

If our goal is to lose twenty pounds in six months, we can plan how to achieve that by imagining it's six months from now and we've lost the weight. What are the things we did to lose the weight? How did we avoid junk food? How did we increase the amount of exercise we were doing? How did we stick to the regimen?