Quotes About Bets

And when religious fanaticism supplants ratiocination, all bets are suddenly off. Anything can happen. Absolutely anything. Common sense is no match for the voice of God—as the actions of Dan Lafferty vividly attest.

This chapter is about the hurdles and best practices in idea selection. To figure out how we can make fewer bad bets, I sought out skilled forecasters who have learned to avoid the risks of false positives and false negatives.

I think a lot of Hollywood is in retreat right now trying to figure out how to make money and make the safest bets.

the leaders of enterprises who make unsound bets do not do so because they are betting with other people's money. On the contrary, they take greater risks when they personally have more at stake.

What I learned at LucasArts was, you don't make your bets on ideas: ideas are cheap. You make your bets on people.

I've known Bezos for decades, since the very early days of Amazon, so it's no surprise to me that he's smart or willing to make big bets.

Men made wagers with their judgment, their allegiances, their resources.

Mom had always taught all of us to examine decisions by reversibility—that is, to hedge our bets. When you couldn't decide between two things, she suggested you choose the one that allowed you to change course if necessary. Not the road less traveled

Hedge funds have made massive leveraged credit bets, knowing that their upside is billions in fees and their downside is millions in fees.

Businesses that do the best job of constant radical change and reinvention simply don't get blinded by the fairy tales of the biggest bets generating the biggest paydays. They realize that successful strategy is discovered by doing, and that doing has to be learned from making lots of small bets.

outlier firms also appeared to have fewer big, high-risk all-or-nothing bets, which is also consistent with an options orientation.

Where I come from, no one settled their disagreements with bets, because no one of us had any money to bet.

The promise of this book is that if we follow the example of poker players by making explicit that our decisions are bets, we can make better decisions and anticipate (and take protective measures) when irrationality is likely to keep us from acting in our best interest.

This makes us more compassionate, both toward ourselves and others. Treating outcome fielding as bets constantly reminds us outcomes are rarely attributable to a single cause and there is almost always uncertainty in figuring out the various causes.

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.

Skepticism is about approaching the world by asking why things might not be true rather than why they are true. It's a recognition that, while there is an objective truth, everything we believe about the world is not true. Thinking in bets embodies skepticism by encouraging us to examine what we do and don't know and what our level of confidence in our beliefs and predictions. This moves us closer to what is objectively true.

You need to be uncomfortable and apprehensive: True strategy is about placing bets and making hard choices. The objective is not to eliminate risk but to increase the odds of success.

The truth is complicated, full of mixed emotions and blurred outcomes and each-way bets. The truth… is a hard sell.

Entrepreneurs have only the murkiest picture of the future in which they are making their bets, and also there is ambiguity: they don't know when they push this lever or that lever that the outcome is going to be what they think it is going to be - there is the law of unanticipated consequences.

The problem was that the issuers of CDSs could issue them with no collateral other than their "full faith and credit," meaning that if their bets lost they might not have the money to pay.

There are as many ways to do this as there are to portray characters in the theater. You can be the drunken cowboy from Texas or the wildly animated lady from Taiwan who can't wait to get her next bet down. You can be Caspar Milquetoast, the nervous accountant from Indianapolis who has already lost too much down the street. Or Miss Spectacular, who draws all the attention to herself, not to how she bets and plays.

If we lived the plans we do more as bets than as forecasts, we would be less anxious and more prepared for the unexpected.

Moreover, Fuld and his team seemed in denial about how badly their bets had gone wrong.

The best restraint is old-fashioned market discipline, in which financial traders know that they, personally, will lose a ton of money if they take risky bets that don't pan out.