More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Annie Duke
Read between
February 7 - February 12, 2018
make it a habit when seeking advice to give the details without revealing the outcome.
Beliefs are also contagious. If our listeners know what we believe to be true, they will likely work pretty hard to justify our beliefs, often without even knowing they are doing it.
Simply put, the group is less likely to succumb to ideological conflicts of interest when they don’t know what the interest is.
Skepticism is about approaching the world by asking why things might not be true rather than why they are true.
true skepticism isn’t confrontational.
lead with assent. For example, listen for the things you agree with, state those and be specific, and then follow with “and” instead of “but.”
when the new information is presented as supplementing rather than negating what has come before, our listeners will be much more open to what we have to say.
“And” is an offer to contribute. “But” is a denial and repudiation of what came before.
respond with “yes, and . . .” “Yes” means you are accepting the construct of the situation. “And” means you are adding to it. That’s an excellent guideline in any situation in which you want to encourage exploratory thought.
If someone is off-loading emotion to us, we can ask them if they are just looking to vent or if they are looking for advice.
tread lightly because people may say they want advice when what they really want is to be affirmed.)
My son was expert at fielding bad test scores as the teacher’s fault. I had to be careful not to Letterman him. Instead, I would tell him, “It must be hard to have a teacher like that. Do you think there’s anything you can do to improve your grade in the future?”
even with our own kids’ decisions, rehashing outcomes can create defensiveness. The future, on the other hand, can always be better if we can get them to focus on things in their control.
6 Adventures in Mental Time Travel
The constant exchange of chips reminds players that there is risk in every decision. Of course, the direction in which the chips flow in the short term only loosely correlates with decision quality. You can win a hand after making bad decisions and lose a hand after making good ones. But the mere fact that chips are changing hands is a reminder that every decision has consequences—that all those execution decisions you make along the way really matter.
Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of good outcomes, not guaranteeing them.
Good results compound. Good processes become habits, and make possible future calibration and improvement.
We are willing to take an irrationally large discount to get a reward now instead of waiting for a bigger reward later.
We can also familiarize ourselves with the likelihood of a negative outcome and how it will feel. Coming to peace with a bad outcome in advance will feel better than refusing to acknowledge it, facing it only after it has happened.
In our decision-making lives, we aren’t that good at taking this kind of perspective—at accessing the past and future to get a better view of how any given moment might fit into the scope of time.
Recruiting past-us and future-us in this way activates the neural pathways that engage the prefrontal cortex, inhibiting emotional mind and keeping events in more rational perspective. This discourages us from magnifying the present moment, blowing it out of proportion and overreacting to it.
Happiness (however we individually define it) is not best measured by looking at the ticker, zooming in and magnifying moment-by-moment or day-by-day movements. We would be better off thinking about our happiness as a long-term stock holding.
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. Our decision-making becomes reactive, focused on off-loading negative emotions or sustaining positive emotions from the latest change in the status quo.
The decisions driven by the emotions of the moment can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, degrading the quality of the bets we make, increasing the chances of bad outcomes, and making things worse.
The way we field outcomes is path dependent. It doesn’t so much matter where we end up as how we got there.
In relationships, even small disagreements seem big in the midst of the disagreement. The problem in all these situations (and countless others) is that our in-the-moment emotions affect the quality of the decisions we make in those moments, and we are very willing to make decisions when we are not emotionally fit to do so.
for people involved in specialized activities, it’s worth it to be able to communicate a complex concept in a single word that laypeople would need lengthy phrases to convey. Having a nuanced, precise vocabulary is what jargon is all about.
If you blow some recent event out of proportion and react in a drastic way, you’re on tilt.
We can precommit to walk away from the situation when we feel the signs of tilt, whether it’s a fight with a spouse or child, aggravation in a work situation, or losing at a poker table. We can take some space till we calm down and get some perspective, recognizing that when we are on tilt we aren’t decision fit.
if we’re going to be self-critical, the focus should be on the lesson and how to calibrate future decisions.
Figure out the possibilities, then take a stab at the probabilities.
It’s about acknowledging that we’re already making a prediction about the future every time we make a decision, so we’re better off if we make that explicit.
anticipate positive or negative developments and plan our strategy, rather than being reactive.
When it comes to advance thinking, standing at the end and looking backward is much more effective than looking forward from the beginning.
Backcasting and premortems complement each other. Backcasting imagines a positive future; a premortem imagines a negative future.
Backcasting is the cheerleader; a premortem is the heckler in the audience.
think about time as a tree. The tree has a trunk, branches at the top, and the place where the trunk meets the branches. The trunk is the past. A tree has only one, growing trunk, just as we have only one, accumulating past. The branches are the potential futures. Thicker branches are the equivalent of more probable futures, thinner branches are less probable ones. The place where the top of the trunk meets the branches is the present. There are many futures, many branches of the tree, but only one past, one trunk.
