Thinking in Bets Quotes

“What did it mean to be a “movie star”? He quoted an actor who explained the type of characters he wanted to play: “I don’t want to be the man who learns. I want to be the man who knows.” We are discouraged from saying “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure.” We regard those expressions as vague, unhelpful, and even evasive. But getting comfortable with “I’m not sure” is a vital step to being a better decision-maker. We have to make peace with not knowing.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“our brains evolved to create certainty and order. We are uncomfortable with the idea that luck plays a significant role in our lives. We recognize the existence of luck, but we resist the idea that, despite our best efforts, things might not work out the way we want. It feels better for us to imagine the world as an orderly place, where randomness does not wreak havoc and things are perfectly predictable.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Professor Ronald Howard, director of the Decisions and Ethics Center at Stanford and the founder of decision analysis, uses countless entertaining variations of how decision bias gets exposed in the common but bothersome flat-tire situation. My favorite is his version where a guy gets a flat tire in front of a mental hospital. A patient from the hospital watches through the fence as the guy, affected by having an audience, steps on the hub cap holding the four nuts from the tire he removed, and they roll down a sewer. The guy feels angry, flustered, helpless. The patient calls through the fence, “Why don’t you remove one nut from each of the other three tires and put those three on the spare?” The guy says, “That’s a brilliant idea. What are you doing in a place like this?” The patient tells him, “I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“It may not feel so good during the planning process to include this focus on the negative space. Over the long run, however, seeing the world more objectively and making better decisions will feel better than turning a blind eye to negative scenarios. In a way, backcasting without premortems is a form of temporal discounting: if we imagine a positive future, we feel better now, but we’ll more than compensate for giving up that immediate gratification through the benefits of seeing the world more accurately, making better initial decisions, and being nimbler about what the world throws our way.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“At the very beginning of my poker career, I heard an aphorism from some of the legends of the profession: “It’s all just one long poker game.” That aphorism is a reminder to take the long view, especially when something big happened in the last half hour, or the previous hand—or when we get a flat tire. Once we learn specific ways to recruit past and future versions of us to remind ourselves of this, we can keep the most recent upticks and downticks in their proper perspective. When we take the long view, we’re going to think in a more rational way.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Because poker players are in a constant struggle to keep in-the-moment fluctuations in perspective, their jargon has a variety of terms for the concept that “bad outcomes can have an impact on your emotions that compromise your decision-making going forward so that you make emotionally charged, irrational decisions that are likely to result in more bad outcomes that will then negatively impact your decision-making going forward and so on.” The most common is tilt. Tilt is the poker player’s worst enemy, and the word instantly communicates to other poker players that you were emotionally unhinged in your decision-making because of the way things turned out.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“Remember, losing feels about twice as bad as winning feels good; being wrong feels about twice as bad as being right feels good. We are in a better place when we don’t have to live at the edges. Euphoria or misery, with no choices in between, is not a very self-compassionate way to live.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“What if we shifted our definition of “I don’t know” from the negative frame (“I have no idea” or “I know nothing about that,” which feels like we lack competence or confidence) to a more neutral frame? What if we thought about it as recognizing that, although we might know something about the chances of some event occurring, we are still not sure how things will turn out in any given instance? That is just the truth. If we accept that, “I’m not sure” might not feel so bad. What good poker players and good decision-makers have in common is their comfort with the world being an uncertain and unpredictable place.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“That’s chess, but life doesn’t look like that. It looks more like poker, where all that uncertainty gives us the room to deceive ourselves and misinterpret the data. Poker gives us the leeway to make mistakes that we never spot because we win the hand anyway and so don’t go looking for them, or the leeway to do everything right, still lose, and treat the losing result as proof that we made a mistake. Resulting, assuming that our decision-making is good or bad based on a small set of outcomes, is a pretty reasonable strategy for learning in chess. But not in poker—or life.”
― Annie Duke, Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts

“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