How to Decide Quotes

“In order to become a better decision-maker, it’s imperative to actively explore all four of the ways that decision quality and outcome quality relate to each other.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“An accurate picture of the odds is important when you’re choosing a path. But once you’ve already made your choice, then you should switch into irrational optimism for the execution phase.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“If you had a navigation app for your goals and decisions, it would work like a premortem and a backcast and its output would look like the Decision Exploration Table. You’ve identified two broad categories of future events (those within and outside your control) that could decrease or increase your chances of failure or success and made an educated guess about their likelihood. You now have a good map of what might lie in the path on the way to your goal.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“Luck exerts its influence between your decision and which of the possible paths you end up on. It is the element you have no control over that determines which of the possible outcomes you actually observe in the short run.”
― Annie Duke, How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

“For any single decision, there are different ways the future could unfold—some better, some worse. When you make a decision, the decision makes certain paths possible (even if you don’t know where they lead) and others impossible. 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