This Will Make You a Better Decision Maker | Annie Duke

Annie Duke, former world champion of poker, teaches us that there’s a huge gap between a good decision and a good outcome. A good decision is based on what we know of the options and the odds. A good outcome happens or it doesn’t: it is a consequence of the odds, not the hidden answer.

I believe this is a pretty noncontroversial thing to say: It’s important to improve your decision process, because it’s the one thing you have control over in determining the quality of your life.

How to make better decisions: slow down and think twice, conduct a premortem, red-team your strategy, consider counterfactuals, minimize hindsight bias and creeping determinism, and consider a wider range of potential outcomes 

good strategy for businesses that want to get better at their quitting decisions: When possible, divide and conquer. Have the people who make the decisions to start things be different from the people who make the decisions to stop those things.

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.

What I’ve experienced in all these different contexts is that people are generally quite poor at explaining how one might go about making a high-quality decision. This difficulty isn’t just confined to novice poker players or college students or entry-level employees. Even when I ask C-level executives—who are literally full-time decision-makers—wh