Quotes from Annie Duke

To make these unlesses most effective, we need to create strong precommitment contracts that set out how we're going to follow through on those kill criteria. Then, to make sure that we're picking the unlesses that are going to get us to the fastest answer about whether the thing we're doing is worth pursuing, we need to do the work of identifying monkeys and pedestals.

Be a data sharer. That's what experts do. In fact, that's one of the reasons experts become experts. They understand that sharing data is the best way to move toward accuracy because it extracts insight from your listeners of the highest fidelity.

Resulting makes us lack compassion for ourselves and others.

When it comes to our aversion to closing accounts in the losses, the pass-fail nature of goals makes this problem worse. As soon as you set a goal or a target, you put yourself immediately in the losses, at least in relation to your distance from the goal. As soon as you cross the starting line, you are now short of the finish line.

There is a rich universe of science studying the human tendency to persevere too long, particularly in the face of bad news.

Unlesses can get us out from under the forces that will keep us playing in the short run, chasing a win, and align our behavior more closely with our long-term best interests.

No matter how far we get from the familiarity of betting at a poker table or in a casino, our decisions are always bets. We routinely decide among alternatives, put resources at risk, assess the likelihood of different outcomes, and consider what it is that we value. Every decision commits us to some course of action that, by definition, eliminates acting on other alternatives. Not placing a bet on something is, itself, a bet.

When it comes to the bad stuff, the inside view tends to lead you to blame luck rather than your own decision-making. After all, luck is the easiest escape hatch for keeping your self-narrative intact. But identifying luck as the primary culprit for your situation won't help you much in addressing the situation.

Hindsight bias, like resulting, makes us lack compassion for ourselves and others.

Goals can also cause a myopia that makes it so we can't see other paths that are available to us, the other opportunities we might be able to pursue instead.

A negative outcome could be a signal to go in and examine our decision-making. That outcome could also be due to bad luck, unrelated to our decision, in which case treating that outcome as a signal to change future decisions would be a mistake.

Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe that an outcome, after it occurs, was predictable or inevitable.

Merely pursuing a goal can cause us to fail to notice what's right in front of us. That's certainly what happened to Stewart Butterfield when he had Slack under his nose. He couldn't fully appreciate its potential until he quit Glitch, closing that account and forcing him back into exploration mode.

Your friend complains about being in a bad relationship. If you ask, "Why don't you just break up?" they'll frequently say, "Because I've put so much time into trying to make this relationship work.

A premortem is an investigation into something awful, but before it happens.

Success means following a good decision process, not just crossing a finish line, especially if it is the wrong one to cross. That means appropriately following kill criteria, listening to our quitting coaches, and recognizing that the progress we've made along the way counts for a lot.

The verdict appears to be a consequence of hindsight bias—the human tendency to believe that whatever happened was bound to happen, and that everyone must have known it. If [the foreman] believed that an explosion was imminent, then he is a monster; but of that there is no evidence. Hindsight bias is not enough to support a verdict.

When we have a negative opinion about the person delivering the message, we close our minds to what they are saying and miss a lot of learning opportunities because of it. Likewise, when we have a positive opinion of the messenger, we tend to accept the message without much vetting. Both are bad.

For the company with the three-year plan to double market share, the premortem headline is "Company Fails to Reach Market Share Goal; Growth Again Stalls." Members of the planning team now imagine delays in new products, loss of key executives or sales or marketing or technical personnel, new products by competitors, adverse economic developments, paradigm shifts that could lead customers to do without the product or rely on alternatives not on the market or in use, etc.

We need to start thinking about waste as a forward-looking problem, not a backward-looking one. That means realizing that spending another minute or another dollar or another bit of effort on something that is no longer worthwhile is the real waste.

A lot of experience can be an excellent teacher. A single experience, not so much.

When your identity is what you do, then what you do becomes hard to abandon, because it means quitting who you are.

We have the intuition that when the world tells us our beliefs need updating, when new information conflicts with a belief we have, we will resolve that conflict by changing our belief. But all too often, like the cult members, we rationalize away the new information so we can defend our prior belief and stick to it.

Surprisingly, being smart can actually make bias worse. Let me give you a different intuitive 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.