Quotes from Annie Duke

What is hopefully (crystal ball) clear by now is that your beliefs create a bottleneck to good decision-making. It doesn't matter how good the quality of your decision process is if the input into that process is junk. That input is your beliefs, and there is a lot of junk in there.

It's like you have a KICK ME sign on your back when it comes to identifying inaccuracies in what you know and believe. You can't see the sign because your eyes can see only what's in front of you. No matter how fast you spin around, you just can't see yourself from the back. Someone keeps kicking you, it's getting irritating, and you can't figure out why, even though you can clearly see the KICK ME signs on everybody else.

That's why, if I had to skill somebody up to get them to be a better decision-maker, quitting is the primary skill I would choose, because the option to quit is what allows you to react to that changing landscape.

When we view these upticks and downticks under the magnification of that in-the-moment zoom lens, our emotional responses are, similarly, amplified. Like the flat tire in the rain, we are capable of treating things that will have little effect on our long-term happiness as having significant impact.

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.

Now imagine if you had gone for that night of blackjack a year ago. When you think about the outcomes as having happened in the distant past, it is likely your preference for the results reverses, landing in a more rational place. You are now happier about the $100 win than about the $100 loss. Once we pull ourselves out of the moment through time-traveling exercises, we can see these things in proportion to their size, free of the distortion caused by whether the ticker just moved up or down.

When we see how much negative space there really is, we shrink down the positive space to a size that more accurately reflects reality and less reflects our naturally optimistic nature.

Because 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.

Even though the importance of making quality decisions seems obvious, it's surprising how few people can actually articulate what a good decision process looks like.

This is actually not that surprising. Outside of vague directives about encouraging critical-thinking skills, decision-making is not explicitly taught in K–12 education.

The corollary of this is also true. 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.

By treating decisions as bets, poker players explicitly recognize that they are deciding on alternative futures, each with benefits and risks. They also recognize there are no simple answers. Some things are unknown or unknowable.

The predictable pattern of blaming the bad stuff on the world and taking credit for the good stuff is by no means limited to poker or car accidents. It's everywhere.

This is consistent with the idea that the scale is gaffed against quitting. It turns out that our psychology puts a thumb on the scale such that by the time we think the options of quitting and sticking are 50-50, it's not even in the vicinity.

For the decision swear jar, we identify the language and thinking patterns that signal we are veering from our goal of truthseeking. When we find ourselves using certain words or succumbing to the thinking patterns we are trying to avoid because we know they are signs of irrationality, a stop-and-think moment can be created. You can think about this as a way to implement accountability

More than 90% of professors rate themselves as better-than-average teachers. About 90% of Americans rate their driving ability as better than average. Only 1% of students think their social skills are below average.

to come up with ways a decision or plan can go bad, so the team can anticipate and account for them.

This phenomenon is called the better-than-average effect.

The outside view disciplines the distortions that live in the inside view. That's why it's important to start with the outside view and anchor there, considering things like what's true of the world in general or the way someone else would view your situation.

Every time we can force our opponents into a bad decision, we win.

It is uncomfortable to think about the possibility of failure, but it's worth it to live in that discomfort because you will be better prepared if things don't turn out according to your ideal.

You know that Chinese proverb, "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step"? Turns out, if we were contemplating a thousand-mile walk, we'd be better off imagining ourselves looking back from the destination and figuring how we got there. When it comes to advance thinking, standing at the end and looking backward is much more effective than looking forward from the beginning.

Accountability, like reinforcement of accuracy, also improves our decision-making and information processing when we are away from the group because we know in advance that we will have to answer to the group for our decisions.

If you want some examples, go back to the very first questions I asked you: What were your best and worst decisions of the last year? The point of having you write those down is that most people don't actually think much about their best and worst decisions. They usually start by thinking of their best and worst outcomes and work backward from there. That's due to resulting.