How to Decide Quotes

“Pros and cons lists are flat, as if (payoff) size doesn’t matter. Because it is merely in list form, a pros and cons list treats the chance of an early arrival as equal to the possibility of getting into a serious traffic accident. Without explicit information about size, about the magnitude of any pro or con, it is unclear how you would compare the positive and negative sides of the list. If there are ten pros and five cons, does that mean you should go with the decision? It is impossible to say without information about the size of the payoffs, because without that you can’t figure out if the upside potential outweighs the downside.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Barry Schwartz points out in his book, The Paradox of Choice, that this kind of sheep-in-wolf’s-clothing decision is more likely to come up the more options you have to choose from. The greater the number of available options, the greater the likelihood that more than one of those options will look pretty good to you. The more options that look pretty good to you, the more time you spend in analysis paralysis. That’s the paradox: more choice, more anxiety. Remember, if the only choices are between Paris and a trout cannery, no one has a problem. But what if the choices are Paris or Rome or Amsterdam or Santorini or Machu Picchu? You get the picture. THE ONLY-OPTION TEST For any options you’re considering, ask yourself, “If this were the only option I had, would I be happy with it?” A useful tool you can use to break the gridlock is the Only-Option Test. If this were the only thing I could order on the menu . . . If this were the only show I could watch on Netflix tonight . . . If this were the only place I could go for vacation . . . If this were the only college I got accepted to . . . If this were the only house I could buy . . . If this were the only job I got offered . . . The Only-Option Test clears away the debris cluttering your decision. If you’d be happy if Paris were your only option, and you’d be happy if Rome were your only option, that reveals that if you just flip a coin, you’ll be happy whichever way the coin lands.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“To figure out whether a decision is good or bad, you need to know not just the things that might reasonably happen and what could be gained or lost, but also the likelihood of each possibility unfolding. That means, to become a better decision-maker, you need to be willing to estimate those probabilities.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“And this feeling that the result of the decision tells you something significant about the quality of the decision process is so powerful that even when the description of the decision is identical (you quit your job and take a new position), your view of that decision changes as the quality of the result changes.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“If you’re like most people, you were pretty surprised by these results. Most of us aren’t aware of the wide range of what these words mean to different people. We assume that when we use a term, other people use it in the same way we do and mean the same thing we do.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Here’s a secret: All guesses are educated guesses because there is almost no estimate you could make about which you literally know nothing.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“SIX STEPS TO BETTER DECISION-MAKING Step 1—Identify the reasonable set of possible outcomes. Step 2—Identify your preference using the payoff for each outcome—to what degree do you like or dislike each outcome, given your values? Step 3—Estimate the likelihood of each outcome unfolding. Step 4—Assess the relative likelihood of outcomes you like and dislike for the option under consideration. Step 5—Repeat Steps 1–4 for other options under consideration. Step 6—Compare the options to one another.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“We want outcome quality to align with decision quality.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“The quality of the outcome casts a shadow over our ability to see the quality of the decision.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“When the outcome turns out poorly, it’s easy to focus on the details that suggest the decision process was poor. We think we are seeing the decision quality rationally because the bad process is obvious.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Determining whether a decision is good or bad means examining the quality of the beliefs informing the decision, the available options, and how the future might turn out given any choice you make.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“For reasons that are going to become clear, a good decision tool seeks to reduce the role of cognitive bias (such as overconfidence, hindsight bias, or confirmation bias) and a pros and cons list tends to amplify the role of bias.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“what you value and what someone else values will be different. And your goals and values will inform your preferences for various outcomes. That means that how much you prefer a particular outcome relative to other possibilities will naturally be different from another person’s preference for the same outcome relative to other possibilities.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Experience is supposed to be our best teacher, but sometimes we draw a connection between outcome quality and decision quality that is too tight.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“A necessary part of becoming a better decision-maker is learning from experience. Experience contains the lessons for improving future decisions. Resulting causes you to learn the wrong lessons.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“RESULTING A mental shortcut in which we use the quality of an outcome to figure out the quality of a decision.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“When people result, they look at whether the result was good or bad to figure out if the decision was good or bad.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Precision uncovers disagreement. It uncovers places where your belief is different from someone else’s belief. And that’s good, because you want to find out when you have something wrong. It gives you the chance to get it right. Think about it like this: Saying “2 + 2 is a small number” will help you get better at math, but it won’t help you become an expert. “A small number” is technically correct, but it is much more helpful for your teacher to find out if you think the answer is 5, or 2, or 4, which are all small numbers. It’s true that the less precise answer makes it harder to be wrong, but you want to find out when you have the wrong answer if you are going to get better at math.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“People didn’t even agree on what the terms always and never meant! If you’re like most people, you were pretty surprised by these results. Most of us aren’t aware of the wide range of what these words mean to different people. We assume that when we use a term, other people use it in the same way we do and mean the same thing we do.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Some of these terms had startlingly wide ranges, which I imagine you experienced in your four-person survey. For instance, “real possibility” had a range of about 20% to 80%. A quarter of the people taking the survey thought the term meant 40% of the time or less. A quarter thought it meant 40% to 60%. A quarter thought it meant 60% to 75%. Finally, a quarter thought it meant over 75% of the time.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Andrew Mauboussin and Michael Mauboussin came up with this pretty comprehensive list of these types of terms for a survey they conducted: Almost always More often than not Serious possibility Almost certainly Never Slam dunk Always Not often Unlikely Certainly Often Usually Frequently Possibly With high probability Likely Probably With low probability Maybe Rarely With moderate probability Might happen Real possibility”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“The actual outcome casts a shadow over your ability to remember what you knew at the time of the decision.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Luck is what intervenes between your decision (which has a range of possible outcomes) and the outcome that you actually get. Because any decision determines only the set of possible outcomes (some good, some bad, some in between), this means good outcomes can result from both good and bad”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“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.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“There’s a name for this: Resulting. When people result, they look at whether the result was good or bad to figure out if the decision was good or bad. (Psychologists”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Most decisions have a mix of upside and downside potentials. When figuring out whether a decision is good or bad, you are essentially asking if the upside potential compensates for the risk of the downside.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“We process outcomes sequentially, treating each outcome as if it stands alone. We don’t sit back and wait to update our beliefs until we have enough data to overcome the uncertain relationship between outcomes and decisions.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“A lot of experience can be an excellent teacher. A single experience, not so much. Looking across a large enough set of decisions and outcomes, we can start to tease out the lessons experience might offer us. Looking at just one outcome, we get resulting and hindsight bias.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Experience is necessary for learning. But we process that experience in a biased way. This means that the very feedback you need to become a better decision-maker can interfere with your ability to learn good lessons from experience.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Left to our own devices, we will notice some of the bad luck but overlook most of the dumb luck.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices