(2018-06-02) Sivers Thinking In Bets By Annie Duke

Derek Sivers: Thinking in Bets - by Annie Duke. A bet is a decision about an uncertain future.

“Real games”: Real life consists of bluffing, of little tactics of deception, of asking yourself what is the other person going to think I mean to do. The decisions you make in your life - in business, saving and spending, health and lifestyle choices, raising your children, and relationships - are “real games”.

Saying “I don’t know” is a necessary step toward enlightenment.

Good decision-makers try to figure out how unsure they are, making their best guess at the chances that different outcomes will occur. (decision-making)

Making better decisions is not about being wrong or right, but about calibrating among all the shades of grey.

Every decision commits you to some course of action that, by definition, eliminates acting on other alternatives. Not placing a bet on something is, itself, a bet.

Most bets are bets against yourself. You are betting against all the future versions of yourself that you are not choosing. (opportunity cost)

Our ancestors could form new beliefs only through what they directly experienced. It’s reasonable to presume our senses aren’t lying.

How you form beliefs was shaped by the evolutionary push toward efficiency rather than accuracy.

You might think of yourself as updating your beliefs based on new information, but you do the opposite, altering your interpretation of that information to fit your beliefs.

You are wired to protect your beliefs even when your goal is to truthseek. Offering a wager brings the risk out in the open.

Acknowledging uncertainty is the first step in measuring and narrowing it. It creates open-mindedness, and a more objective stance.

Identify when the outcomes of your decisions have something to teach you and what that lesson might be.

Any decision is a bet on what will likely create the most favorable future for you. The future you have bet on unfolds as a series of outcomes.

Why did something happen the way it did? Bet on how you figure out what you should learn from an outcome. If you determine your decisions drove the outcome, you can feed the data you get following those decisions back into belief formation and updating, creating a learning loop. The challenge is that any single outcome can happen for multiple reasons. ("In a complex system, you can't even learn from your mistakes.")

An experienced player will choose to play only about 20% of the hands they are dealt, forfeiting the other 80% of the hands before even getting past the first round of betting.

To change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine.

Thinking in bets triggers a more open-minded exploration of alternative hypotheses, of reasons supporting conclusions opposite to the routine of self-serving bias.

Where the challenge of a bet is always looming, evidence that might contradict a belief you hold is no longer viewed through as hurtful a frame. Rather, it is viewed as helpful because it can improve your chances of making a better bet.

Ask yourself a set of simple questions at the moment of the decision designed to get future-you and past-you involved. What are the consequences of each of my options in ten minutes? In ten months? In ten years?

Think about your happiness as a long-term stock holding, not focused on day-by-day movements. Strive for a long, sustaining upward trend in your happiness stock.

You’re already making a prediction about the future every time you make a decision, so you’re better off if you make that explicit.

Your decision-making improves when you can more vividly imagine the future, free of the distortions of the present.

Negative visualization makes you more likely to achieve your goals. Imagine obstacles in the way of reaching your goals. Start a premortem by imagining why you failed to reach your goal.

The likelihood of positive and negative futures must add up to 100%. When you see how much negative space there really is, you shrink down the positive space to a size that more accurately reflects reality and less reflects your naturally optimistic nature.