The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

by Maria Konnikova

In what’s known as the planning fallacy, we tend to be overly optimistic when we map out timelines, goals, targets, and other horizons.

We look at the best-case scenario instead of using the past to determine what a more realistic scenario would look like.

The status quo bias: continue with the action you’ve already decided on, regardless of new information.

It’s the classic sunk cost fallacy in action: you keep to your course because of the resources you’ve already invested.

Never feel like you have to do something just because it’s expected of you—even if you’re the one who expects it of you. Know when to step back. Know when to recalibrate. Know when you need to reassess your strategy, prior plans be damned.

First dates aren’t simply about honesty. Silence and awkwardness have to be earned. First dates are about dazzle. You play each hand, even when you’d rather fold and crawl back home, admitting defeat.

“Luck is not something you can mention in the presence of self-made men,” E. B. White wrote during World War II. “The Society of Movers and Doers is a very pompous society, indeed, whose members solemnly accept all responsibility for their own eminence and success.”

Gambling, real gambling, not the high-level poker I’ve become accustomed to, frightens me.

Poker rewards the logical and the rational, and, yes, the creative, but with a reason behind it. Gambling is about chaos. It rewards the illogical, the irrationally exuberant. It preys on weakness.

You can’t control what will happen, so it makes no sense to try to guess at it. Chance is just chance: it is neither good nor bad nor personal. Without us to supply meaning, it’s simple noise. The most we can do is learn to control what we can—our thinking, our decision processes, our reactions. “Some things are in our control and others not,” writes the Stoic philosopher Epictetus in The Enchiridion. “Things in our control are opinion, pursuit, desire, aversion, and, in a word, whatever are our own actions. Things not in our control are body, property, reputation, command, and, in one word, whatever are not our own actions.”

Because life is life, luck will always be a factor in anything we might do or undertake. Skill can open up new vistas, new choices, allow us to see the chance that others less skilled than us, less observant or less keen, may miss—but should chance go against us, all our skill can do is mitigate the damage.