Annie Duke

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.

Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome.

Quick or dead: our brains weren’t built for rationality

You could teach someone the rules of poker in five minutes, put them at a table with a world champion player, deal a hand (or several), and the novice could beat the champion. That could never happen in chess.

The quality of our lives is the sum of decision quality plus luck.

As we learn more about how our brains operate, we recognize that we don’t perceive the world objectively. But our goal should be to try.

every decision has risks

The promise of this book is that if we follow the example of poker players by making explicit that our decisions are bets, we can make better decisions and anticipate (and take protective measures) when irrationality is likely to keep us from acting in our best interest.

We don’t think of our parenting choices as bets but they are. We want our children to be happy, productive adults when we send them out into the world. Whenever we make a parenting choice (about discipline, nutrition, school, parenting philosophy, where to live, etc.), we are betting that our choice will achieve the future we want for our children more than any other choice we might make given the constraints of the limited resources we have to allocate—our time, our money, our attention.

Poker players live in a world where that risk is made explicit. They can get comfortable with uncertainty because they put it up front in their decisions