Thinking in Bets Quotes

“Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“This tendency we all have to favor our present-self at the expense of our future-self is called temporal discounting.* We are willing to take an irrationally large discount to get a reward now instead of waiting for a bigger reward later.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“TED Talk, “The Pursuit of Ignorance.”) In the book and the talk, Firestein”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“I know viscerally how likely 60–40 and 70–30 favorites are to lose (and, of course, the opposite). When people complained that Nate Silver did his job poorly because he had Clinton favored, I thought, “Those people haven’t gotten all their chips in a pot with a pair against a straight draw and lost.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Early on in my career, I saw Erik during a break in a tournament, and started moaning to him about my bad luck in losing a big hand. In three sentences, he laid out all the elements of a productive group charter. “I don’t want to hear it. I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, but if you have a question about a hand, you can ask me about strategy all day long. I just don’t think there’s much purpose in a poker story if the point is about something you had no control over, like bad luck.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“We might adopt the mindful practices of Buddhist monks, observing the flow of inner thoughts, emotions, and bodily sensations without judging them as good or bad at all. That’s a great goal, and I’m all for a regular mindful practice. It will, the research indicates, help improve quality of life and is worth pursuing. But getting all the way there is a tall order if we don’t want to quit our day jobs and move to Tibet. It works against the way our brains evolved, against our competitive drive.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“By keeping an accurate representation of what could have happened (and not a version edited by hindsight), memorializing the scenario plans and decision trees we create through good planning process, we can be better calibrators going forward. We can also be happier by recognizing and getting comfortable with the uncertainty of the world. Instead of living at extremes, we can find contentment with doing our best under uncertain circumstances, and being committed to improving from our experience.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Our beliefs drive the bets we make: which brands of cars better retain their value, whether critics knew what they were talking about when they panned a movie we are thinking about seeing, how our employees will behave if we let them work from home.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Job and relocation decisions are bets. Sales negotiations and contracts are bets. Buying a house is a bet. Ordering the chicken instead of the steak is a bet. Everything is a bet.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“When people complained that Nate Silver did his job poorly because he had Clinton favored, I thought, “Those people haven’t gotten all their chips in a pot with a pair against a straight draw and lost.” Or, more likely, they’ve had those things happen throughout their lives and didn’t realize that’s what 30% or 40% feels like.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Poker, in contrast, is a game of incomplete information. It is a game of decision-making under conditions of uncertainty over time. (Not coincidentally, that is close to the definition of game theory.) Valuable information remains hidden. There is also an element of luck in any outcome. You could make the best possible decision at every point and still lose the hand, because you don’t know what new cards will be dealt and revealed. Once the game is finished and you try to learn from the results, separating the quality of your”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Backcasting and premortems complement each other. Backcasting imagines a positive future; a premortem imagines a negative future. We can’t create a complete picture without representing both the positive space and the negative space. Backcasting reveals the positive space. Premortems reveal the negative space. Backcasting is the cheerleader; a premortem is the heckler in the audience.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Jerry Seinfeld, on why he doesn’t get enough sleep: “I stay up late at night because I’m Night Guy. Night Guy wants to stay up late. ‘What about getting up after five hours of sleep?’ ‘That’s Morning Guy’s problem. That’s not my problem. I’m Night Guy. I stay up as late as I want.’ So you get up in the morning: you’re exhausted, you’re groggy. ‘Oooh, I hate that Night Guy.’ See, Night Guy always screws Morning Guy.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Do you want to just let it all out, or are you thinking of what to do about it next?”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“CUDOS stands for Communism (data belong to the group), Universalism (apply uniform standards to claims and evidence, regardless of where they came from), Disinterestedness (vigilance against potential conflicts that can influence the group’s evaluation), and Organized Skepticism (discussion among the group to encourage engagement and dissent).”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Talking about winning (even if we are identifying mistakes along the way to a win) is less painful than talking about losing, allowing new habits to be more easily trained. Identifying mistakes in hands I won reinforced the separation between outcomes and decision quality. These discussions also made me feel good about analyzing and questioning my decisions because of the approval I got from Howard and the players I looked up to. I used that approval as evidence that I understood the game and had promise as a player. When they complimented me for finding alternative approaches in my winning hands or understanding the contribution of luck, that felt terrific. In time, I could expand this approach to identifying learning opportunities in any hand I played, not just the winning ones.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Keep the reward of feeling like we are doing well compared to our peers, but change the features by which we compare ourselves: be a better credit-giver than your peers, more willing than others to admit mistakes, more willing to explore possible reasons for an outcome with an open mind, even, and especially, if that might cast you in a bad light or shine a good light on someone else. In this way we can feel that we are doing well by comparison because we are doing something unusual and hard that most people don’t do. That makes us feel exceptional.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“The predictable pattern of blaming the bad stuff on the world and taking credit for the good stuff is by no means limited to poker or car accidents. It’s everywhere.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Aldous Huxley recognized, “Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Have you ever had a moment of regret after a decision where you felt, “I knew I should have made the other choice!”? That’s an alternative version of you saying, “See, I told you so!”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing. We are constantly deciding among alternative futures: one where we go to the movies, one where we go bowling, one where we stay home.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Are you ready to really wrap your arms around uncertainty, like great decision-makers do? Are you ready to embrace this redefinition of wrong, and to recognize you are always guessing and that those guesses drive how you place your resources? Getting comfortable with this realignment, and all the good things that follow, starts with recognizing that you’ve been betting all along.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“The most successful investors in start-up companies have a majority of bad results. If you applied to NASA’s astronaut program or the NBC page program, both of which have drawn thousands of applicants for a handful of positions, things will go your way a minority of the time, but you didn’t necessarily do anything wrong. Don’t fall in love or even date anybody if you want only positive results. The world is structured to give us lots of opportunities to feel bad about being wrong if we want to measure ourselves by outcomes. Don’t fall for it!”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Poker teaches that lesson. A great poker player who has a good-size advantage over the other players at the table, making significantly better strategic decisions, will still be losing over 40% of the time at the end of eight hours of play. That’s a whole lot of wrong. And it’s not just confined to poker.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Redefining wrong allows us to let go of all the anguish that comes from getting a bad result. But it also means we must redefine “right.” If we aren’t wrong just because things didn’t work out, then we aren’t right just because things turned out well. Do we win emotionally to making that mindset trade-off? Being right feels really good. “I was right,” “I knew it,” “I told you so”—those are all things that we say, and they all feel very good to us. Should we be willing to give up the good feeling of “right” to get rid of the anguish of “wrong”? Yes. First, the world is a pretty random place. The influence of luck makes it impossible to predict exactly how things will turn out, and all the hidden information makes it even worse. If we don’t change our mindset, we’re going to have to deal with being wrong a lot. It’s built into the equation.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Look how quickly you can begin to redefine what it means to be wrong. Once we start thinking like this, it becomes easier to resist the temptation to make snap judgments after results or say things like “I knew it” or “I should have known.” Better decision-making and more self-compassion follow.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“At one such tournament, I told the audience that one player would win 76% of the time and the other would win 24% of the time. I dealt the remaining cards, the last of which turned the 24% hand into the winner. Amid the cheers and groans, someone in the audience called out, “Annie, you were wrong!” In the same spirit that he said it, I explained that I wasn’t. “I said that would happen 24% of the time. That’s not zero. You got to see part of the 24%!”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“What good poker players and good decision-makers have in common is their comfort with the world being an uncertain and unpredictable place. They understand that they can almost never know exactly how something will turn out. They embrace that uncertainty and, instead of focusing on being sure, they try to figure out how unsure they are, making their best guess at the chances that different outcomes will occur.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“But life is more like poker. You could make the smartest, most careful decision in firing a company president and still have it blow up in your face. You could run a red light and get through the intersection safely—or follow all the traffic rules and signals and end up in an accident. You could teach someone the rules of poker in five minutes, put them at a table with a world champion player, deal a hand (or several), and the novice could beat the champion. That could never happen in chess.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts