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by Robin Sharma
Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts
"Thinking in Bets" by Annie Duke shows how to make better decisions, using the principles of poker. It explores the limitations of human reasoning and how to think probabilistically to improve outcomes in uncertain situations.
Super Bowl XLIX ended in controversy. With 26 seconds left in the game, everyone expected Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll to tell his quarterback, Russell Wilson, to hand the ball off. Instead, he told Wilson to pass. The ball was intercepted, the Seahawks lost the Super Bowl, and, by the next day, public opinion about Carroll had turned nasty. The headline in the Seattle Times read: “Seahawks Lost Because of the Worst Call in Super Bowl History”!
But it wasn’t really Carroll’s decision that was being judged. Given the circumstances, it was actually a fairly reasonable call. It was the fact that it didn’t work.
Poker players call this tendency to confuse the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome resulting, and it’s a dangerous tendency. A bad decision can lead to a good outcome, after all, and good decisions can lead to bad outcomes. No one who’s driven home drunk has woken up the next day and seen it as a good decision just because they didn’t get into an accident.
In fact, decisions are rarely 100 percent right or wrong. Life isn’t like that. Life is like poker, a game of incomplete information – since you never know what cards the other players are holding – and luck. Our decision-making is like poker players’ bets. We bet on future outcomes based on what we believe is most likely to occur.
So why not look at it this way? If our decisions are bets, we can start to let go of the idea that we’re 100 percent “right” or “wrong," and start to say, “I’m not sure.” This opens us up to thinking in terms of probability, which is far more useful.
Volunteering at a charity poker tournament, the author once explained to the crowd that player A’s cards would win 76 percent of the time, giving the other player a 24 percent chance to win. When player B won, a spectator yelled out that she’d been wrong.
But, she explained, she’d said that player B’s hand would win 24 percent of the time. She wasn’t wrong. It was just that the actual outcome fell within that 24 percent margin.
In any situation, the best decision isn’t guaranteed to work out, and even terrible decisions can sometimes turn out to be the right ones. So when things go wrong, who do we blame and why? And what about when things go right? In Thinking In Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts (2018), poker champion, author and business consultant Annie Duke shows how our addiction to outcomes leads to irrational thinking and the confusion of luck with skill.
Thinking in Bets (2018) by Annie Duke is a thought-provoking book that challenges our decision-making process. Here's why this book is worth reading:
Statements of science are not of what is true and what is not true, but . . . what is known to different degrees of certainty . . . – Richard Feynman
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Try Blinkist to get the key ideas from 7,500+ bestselling nonfiction titles and podcasts. Listen or read in just 15 minutes.
Start your free trialBlink 3 of 8 - The 5 AM Club
by Robin Sharma
What is the main message of Thinking in Bets?
The main message of Thinking in Bets is to make better decisions by embracing uncertainty and using the principles of poker.
How long does it take to read Thinking in Bets?
The reading time for Thinking in Bets varies, but it can be read in a few hours. The Blinkist summary can be read in 15 minutes.
Is Thinking in Bets a good book? Is it worth reading?
Thinking in Bets is worth reading for its insights into decision-making. It offers practical advice for navigating uncertainty.
Who is the author of Thinking in Bets?
The author of Thinking in Bets is Annie Duke.