*Welcome to all the new subscribers! Honored that you'd want to read what I have to say.*
We've all heard some variant of the phrase, "Life is chess, not checkers,” yet I recently discovered that I disagree. Life is actually poker. It is a series of events you don't entirely control. I finished Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke and was compelled to dedicate an entire newsletter to it. The book provided one of the best frameworks I've seen for decision making.
“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. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.”
Luck has much more to do with what happens in our lives than we care to admit. Knowing this, we must make our best effort to be more objective in evaluating any given situation. The core tenet of Duke's book is that we have usually think of decisions in a deterministic way:
Decision > Outcome > Result > Lesson > Repeated Decision
The way we should actually think about decisions is the following:
“What makes a decision great is not that it has a great outcome. A great decision is the result of a good process, and that process must include an attempt to accurately represent our own state of knowledge. That state of knowledge, in turn, is some variation of “I’m not sure.”
Whenever we are on the precipice of any decision, we should think about the range of potential outcomes and what the end result will be. Further, once we have seen the outcome, we must be objective in our analysis of the result. The truth is, we're almost always not sure of what the outcome will be, and yet we're always 100% positive we are. The world could use a lot more of "I'm not sure.” My favorite actionable lesson from the book was the concept of negative visualization:
“As Nietzsche points out, regret can do nothing to change what has already happened. We just wallow in remorse about something over which we no longer have any control. But if regret happened before a decision instead of after, the experience of regret might get us to change a choice likely to result in a bad outcome.”
Duke highlight's a powerful tool for making decisions: imagine how we'd feel after a decision before we make it. Thinking about not working out today? Imagine the regret you'd feel.
There were countless lessons from this book. I found these three great book summaries if you wanted to dive-in deeper: here, here, and here.
Wrapping up:
1.) What can you learn from the outcome of a decision you made recently?
2.) What's an area of your life where you can say "I'm not sure" more frequently?
3.) What's one area of your life you can apply negative visualization to impact a positive outcome?
/ae
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