Quotes About Evaluation

Most decisions have a mix of upside and downside potentials. When figuring out whether a decision is good or bad, you are essentially asking if the upside potential compensates for the risk of the downside.

We are all trying to defend ourselves against how we imagine other people are going to judge us.

Kill criteria could consist of information you learn that tells you the monkey isn't trainable or that you're not sufficiently likely to reach your goal, or signs that luck has gone against you.

A common, simple way to develop kill criteria is with "states and dates:" "If by (date), I have/haven't (reached a particular state), I'll quit.

Essentially, regardless of the history they have with the decision, they ask themselves, "If I were approaching this decision fresh, would I want to enter into this course of action?

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 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.

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.

Exacerbating the pass-fail problem is that once we establish a goal, we rarely revisit it. Goals tend to be set-it-and-forget-it. The finish line doesn't move.

Remember, the likelihood of positive and negative futures must add up to 100%. The positive space of backcasting and the negative space of a premortem still have to fit in a finite amount of space. 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

I'm going to keep developing this product unless I fail to hit clear benchmarks within the next two months that I've set with my quitting coach.

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.

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.

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

was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome.

victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome.

Being in the losses is as much a state of mind as anything else. We don't see ourselves as being in the gains, even though we've gone farther than where we started, because we're not measuring ourselves by how far we are past the starting line. We're measuring ourselves by whether we're short of the finish line.

Progress along the way should count for something, but we discard it because goals are pass-fail, all-or-nothing, yes-or-no. There's no partial credit given.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.