How to Decide Quotes

“Chapter 7: Breaking Free from Analysis Paralysis (page 163)

When a decision is hard, that means it's easy

When you're weighing two options that are close, then the decision is actually easy, because whichever one you choose you can't be that wrong since the difference between the two is so small.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Chapter 4: The Three Ps: Preferences, Payoffs, and Probabilities (page 92)

Adding probability estimates to the decision tree will significantly improve the quality of your decisions versus simply identifying the possibilities and your preferences.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Chapter 3: The Decision Multiverse (page 53)

What you are starting to create is the foundation of a decision tree, a useful tool for evaluating past decisions and improving the quality of new ones.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Chapter 2: As the Old Saying Goes, Hindsight Is Not 20/20 (page 29)

Hindsight bias

The tendency to believe an event, after it occurs, was predictable or inevitable. It's also been referred to as "knew-it-all-along" thinking or "creeping determinism.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Chapter 2: As the Old Saying Goes, Hindsight Is Not 20/20 (page 38)

Hindsight bias vaccine

As you were using the Knowledge Tracker, it may have occurred to you that it would be a good idea to journal the "stuff you knew before the decision" while you are in the process of making the decision.

It can be hard to accurately recall what you knew before the fact once you already know the outcome. Journaling gives you something concrete to refer back to.

Writing down the key facts informing your decision also acts like a vaccine against hindsight bias. Thinking about what you know at the time of the decision in this more deliberative way creates a clearer time stamp, preventing memory creep before it happens.

Later in this book we'll take a deep dive into how to better memorialize decisions.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Chapter 1: As the Old Saying Goes, Hindsight Is Not 20/20 (page 38)

Hindsight bias vaccine

As you were using the Knowledge Tracker, it may have occurred to you that it would be a good idea to journal the "stuff you knew before the decision" while you are in the process of making the decision.

It can be hard to accurately recall what you knew before the fact once you already know the outcome. Journaling gives you something concrete to refer back to.

Writing down the key facts informing your decision also acts like a vaccine against hindsight bias. Thinking about what you know at the time of the decision in this more deliberative way creates a clearer time stamp, preventing memory creep before it happens.

Later in this book we'll take a deep dive into how to better memorialize decisions.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Chapter 1: As the Old Saying Goes, Hindsight Is Not 20/20 (page 29)

Hindsight bias

The tendency to believe an event, after it occurs, was predictable or inevitable. It's also been referred to as "knew-it-all-along" thinking or "creeping determinism.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Chapter 1: Resulting (page 3)

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

“Chapter 1: Resulting (page 3)

Resulting

A mental shortuct 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

“Introduction (page XV)

The only thing you have control over that can influence the way your life turns out is the quality of your decisions.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Chapter 1: Resulting (page 20)

Resulting makes us lack compassion for ourselves and others.

When someone has a bad outcome in their life, we judge their decision-making as poor because of resulting. That makes it easy to blame them for the way things turned out. No need to have compassion because the outcome was their fault.

And it's not just other people. We lack self-compassion when we make these connections in our own lives. We beat ourselves up when things don't work out the way we had hoped.

For good outcomes, we're not doing anyone a service by potentially overlooking their mistakes simply because it worked out. We're definitely hurting ourselves, not just in learning, but in assessing our self-worth based on how things turned out rather than on whether we made a good decision under the circumstances.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Introduction (page XV)

No matter what type of decision you're facing, it's imperative to develop a decision process that not only improves your decision quality, but also helps sort your decisions so you can identify which ones are bigger and which ones are smaller.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“We want the world to make sense in this way, to be less random than it is.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

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

“In every domain, the outcome tail is wagging the decision dog.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

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

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

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

“When it comes to the bad stuff, the inside view tends to lead you to blame luck rather than your own decision-making. After all, luck is the easiest escape hatch for keeping your self-narrative intact. But identifying luck as the primary culprit for your situation won’t help you much in addressing the situation.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Seek out the outside view with an open mind. You’ll be more likely to find out about the KICK ME sign on your back, the spinach in your teeth, and all the things you’re having trouble seeing from your perspective. That will help you clear out the junk, which will improve your decisions.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“That’s why we naturally end up in echo chambers. The inside view feels especially good when it’s sold as the outside view, in the guise of someone supposedly offering an objective perspective that merely confirms what you believe. But that only serves to amplify the inside view, strengthening your view of the world because it feels certified by others.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Be thankful when people disagree with you in good faith because they are being kind when they do.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“It’s embarrassing when someone tells you that you have something stuck in your teeth. It’s more embarrassing when that stuff stays stuck in your teeth because no one told you. By “being kind” and keeping what they see from you, they inadvertently deny you the chance to get the spinach out of your teeth.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Now for the bad news: Being smart doesn’t make you less susceptible to the inside view. If anything, it makes it worse. It straps your beliefs into the driver’s seat more firmly. Research across a variety of settings has shown that being smart makes you better at motivated reasoning, the tendency to reason about information to confirm your prior beliefs and arrive at the conclusion you desire.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“It is uncomfortable to think about the possibility of failure, but it’s worth it to live in that discomfort because you will be better prepared if things don’t turn out according to your ideal.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“The outside view disciplines the distortions that live in the inside view. That’s why it’s important to start with the outside view and anchor there, considering things like what’s true of the world in general or the way someone else would view your situation.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“This phenomenon is called the better-than-average effect.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“More than 90% of professors rate themselves as better-than-average teachers. About 90% of Americans rate their driving ability as better than average. Only 1% of students think their social skills are below average.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“It’s like you have a KICK ME sign on your back when it comes to identifying inaccuracies in what you know and believe. You can’t see the sign because your eyes can see only what’s in front of you. No matter how fast you spin around, you just can’t see yourself from the back. Someone keeps kicking you, it’s getting irritating, and you can’t figure out why, even though you can clearly see the KICK ME signs on everybody else.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“What is hopefully (crystal ball) clear by now is that your beliefs create a bottleneck to good decision-making. It doesn’t matter how good the quality of your decision process is if the input into that process is junk. That input is your beliefs, and there is a lot of junk in there.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices