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Annie Duke

Annie Duke Books

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“There is always opportunity cost in choosing one path over others. The betting elements of decisions—choice, probability, risk, etc.—are more obvious in some situations than others. Investments are clearly bets. A decision about a stock (buy, don’t buy, sell, hold, not to mention esoteric investment options) involves a choice about the best use of financial resources. Incomplete information and factors outside of our control make all our investment choices uncertain. We evaluate what we can, figure out what we think will maximize our investment money, and execute. Deciding not to invest or not to sell a stock, likewise, is a bet. These are the same decisions I make during a hand of poker: fold, check, call, bet, or raise.”

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Book:Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
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“For any single decision, there are different ways the future could unfold—some better, some worse. When you make a decision, the decision makes certain paths possible (even if you don’t know where they lead) and others impossible. The decision you make determines which set of outcomes are possible and how likely each of those outcomes is. But it doesn’t determine which of that set of outcomes will actually happen.”

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Book:How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices
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“If you had a navigation app for your goals and decisions, it would work like a premortem and a backcast and its output would look like the Decision Exploration Table. You’ve identified two broad categories of future events (those within and outside your control) that could decrease or increase your chances of failure or success and made an educated guess about their likelihood. You now have a good map of what might lie in the path on the way to your goal.”

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Book:How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices
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“Chapter 1: Resulting (page 20) Resulting makes us lack compassion for ourselves and others. When someone has a bad outcome in their life, we judge their decision-making as poor because of resulting. That makes it easy to blame them for the way things turned out. No need to have compassion because the outcome was their fault. And it's not just other people. We lack self-compassion when we make these connections in our own lives. We beat ourselves up when things don't work out the way we had hoped. For good outcomes, we're not doing anyone a service by potentially overlooking their mistakes simply because it worked out. We're definitely hurting ourselves, not just in learning, but in assessing our self-worth based on how things turned out rather than on whether we made a good decision under the circumstances.”

PsychologyProductivityDecision MakingNon Fiction
Book:How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices
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“Chapter 1: As the Old Saying Goes, Hindsight Is Not 20/20 (page 38) Hindsight bias vaccine As you were using the Knowledge Tracker, it may have occurred to you that it would be a good idea to journal the "stuff you knew before the decision" while you are in the process of making the decision. It can be hard to accurately recall what you knew before the fact once you already know the outcome. Journaling gives you something concrete to refer back to. Writing down the key facts informing your decision also acts like a vaccine against hindsight bias. Thinking about what you know at the time of the decision in this more deliberative way creates a clearer time stamp, preventing memory creep before it happens. Later in this book we'll take a deep dive into how to better memorialize decisions.”

PsychologyProductivityDecision MakingNon Fiction
Book:How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices
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“Chapter 2: As the Old Saying Goes, Hindsight Is Not 20/20 (page 38) Hindsight bias vaccine As you were using the Knowledge Tracker, it may have occurred to you that it would be a good idea to journal the "stuff you knew before the decision" while you are in the process of making the decision. It can be hard to accurately recall what you knew before the fact once you already know the outcome. Journaling gives you something concrete to refer back to. Writing down the key facts informing your decision also acts like a vaccine against hindsight bias. Thinking about what you know at the time of the decision in this more deliberative way creates a clearer time stamp, preventing memory creep before it happens. Later in this book we'll take a deep dive into how to better memorialize decisions.”

PsychologyProductivityDecision MakingNon Fiction
Book:How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices
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“Whenever we choose an alternative (whether it is taking a new job or moving to Des Moines for month), we are automatically rejecting every other possible choice. All those rejected alternatives are paths to possible futures where things could be better or worse than the path we chose. There is potential opportunity cost in any choice we forgo.”

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Book:Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts
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“In rock, paper, scissors the key is, and this is the best piece of advice that I can give you, if you do think that you recognize the pattern from your opponent, it's good to try to throw a tie as opposed to a win. A tie will very often get you a tie or a win, whereas a win will get you a win or a loss. For example, if you think that someone might throw a rock, it's good to throw rock back at them. You should be going for ties. That's actually a really good strategy to win at rock, paper, scissors. There's my rock, paper, scissors advice for you.”

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Author:Annie Duke
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