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Episode 228: Annie Duke Tells You How to Decide
146 Plays4 years ago
Annie Duke is the author of How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices.
You can follow her @annieduke on Twitter and visit her website annieduke.com.
Keep the conversation going by linking up to @CNFPod on social media and sign up for the monthly newsletters at brendanomeara.com. Reading recommendations, podcast news, and a CNFin' Happy Hour for subscribers only!
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Transcript
Introduction to Annie Duke
00:00:00
Speaker
The thing with Annie Duke is that she's sort of intimidating. I mean, before you meet her, of course. Because here's a rundown of her accolades. She's a poker champion who's won millions of dollars at the table. She's Ivy League educated. She's the best-selling author of Thinking in Bets. She wrote How I Raised, Falded, Bluffed, Flirted, Cursed in One Millions.
00:00:23
Speaker
the World Series of Poker. She works with the actor Dawn Cheadle with Anti-Up Africa. She's a decision-making maven in her new book, How to Decide. Simple
Meet Brendan O'Mara and the Podcast
00:00:35
Speaker
Tools for Making Better Choices is out now and it is brilliant. And when you do this kind of thing, you like to dig in and learn a little bit about these people, am I right?
00:00:51
Speaker
I feel like maybe you're a little bit of a stalker. Well, in a way, she has a point because that's what we do here. I'm Brendan O'Mara, and this is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast. Oh, yes, I speak to badass people about the art and craft telling true stories. Some of you know that. Some of you probably don't. Welcome. If you don't grab a beer.
How to Make Good Decisions
00:01:21
Speaker
and with Annie's book and I don't say this lightly it's an important book to read because what is more fundamental to living life than making decisions and what it is or what is so important if I have to say there's one takeaway of the myriad takeaways it's this you can make a good decision
00:01:45
Speaker
and have a bad outcome likewise you can make bad decisions and through dumb luck have a good outcome and then misattribute your good outcome to a great decision this book matters Annie talks about growing up in New Hampshire her early job at KFC when to quit not necessarily when to quit KFC though you might want an exit plan depending on your career path but like when to quit anything resulting and much more
00:02:15
Speaker
You'll want to head over to BrendanOmero.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter where I share reading recommendations, podcast news, and even host a virtual CNF and happy hour where we get a drink, talk shop, just hang out. And there's other creative things I have in the works to deal with that. We had a really great inaugural one for the November gang. I hope more people join for the next one. Tell your friends.
00:02:45
Speaker
Once a month, no spam, can't beat it. Please link up to the show. You can tag us on social media at cnfpod. You might also want to tag at Annie Duke on Twitter as well and visit her website, anniduke.com to get more familiar with the incredible work she's doing around the art and science of making great decisions. So let's do this, man. Here's Annie.
Annie's Early Life and Adventures
00:03:10
Speaker
Ooh.
00:03:15
Speaker
Oh my gosh, this is really, that's great. This is, that's not the question I was expecting. Um, okay. So basically it was, you know, so I wanted to say times were different back then. So I grew up in New Hampshire and conquered New Hampshire actually, which is about an hour and 15 minutes outside of Boston. And nowadays I feel like we kind of think about
00:03:38
Speaker
You know, just hopping in the car and going somewhere that's like an hour away is like a nothing trip. Like obviously you would totally do that.
00:03:46
Speaker
But for some reason, when I was growing up, it was a big deal. I mean, Manchester, which is another city that's a little bit closer to Boston, is about 20 minutes from where I lived. And we really didn't hardly go there. So Boston was a big deal for us. We went about twice a year. And there were two things that we went for. One was there was usually some sort of show where they were doing like a Broadway show was getting tested out or something like that at the garden.
00:04:13
Speaker
So we would go to something like that every year. So that would be one of the trips we would take. But the other trip we would take every summer was to go to Fenway. And we sat in the bleachers and sort of under the sicko sign. And yeah, we would go every year. So I'll tell you one of my best memories of that, because I was young. I was very young when we would do that.
00:04:37
Speaker
We went on the day that you were supposed to fill out your vote for the All-Star game. And my brother was a really big sports fan. And he was also older than I was. So there were lots of reasons why he would have been following this more than me. So on my ticket for catcher, I put down Thurman Munson.
00:04:59
Speaker
I think because I liked his name or something. I was young. I think I liked his name or I recognized the name or I mistakenly thought that he was on the Red Sox. So I filled out my ballot and then my brother, just in horror, berated me.
00:05:14
Speaker
and said, you know, how could you do that? He's a Yankee. You can't do that. That's so horrible. You know, like the dreaded enemy. But obviously I'd already filled out my ballot. So I cast my vote for Thurman Munson, I guess somewhat accidentally. But that was actually the year that he died. And then I was like, see, now I feel good that I voted for him. By the way, one thing I want to say about Fenway, which is so fun, is it's like probably the only baseball park where you can get pretty good clam chowder.
00:05:44
Speaker
So my father was a school teacher and the school that he taught at for the first, you know, the first probably sixth
00:05:56
Speaker
maybe six or seven, eight years of my life didn't have any kind of summer program to offer him. So, you know, I mean, he got a pretty good salary, but, you know, normally he would have wanted to supplement that during the summer because, you know, teachers don't get paid a whole lot. So the way he supplemented it was during the summers, he would work at Howdy Beef and Burger. And so what is Howdy Beef and Burger? You might wonder. It was like the New England had some of these Howdy Beef and Burgers that were really like a McDonald's.
00:06:27
Speaker
Um, so this was before McDonald's took over the world and there was this other choice that wasn't Burger King or McDonald's. So he did that because obviously he was a teacher. So he, you know, during the summer he couldn't take a job that was more than, you know, something that was more like part-time and flexible because he was going to go back to teaching. So we have pictures of my dad wearing like back then he had like on the paper hat, you know, that they would make you wear with like the apron. There's some pretty funny pictures of him working at Howdy Beef and Burger.
00:06:55
Speaker
So anyway, that's what he did. Eventually, the program at the school that he taught at ended up with a summer program. So he started teaching in the summer to supplement the income as opposed to flipping burgers. But at that place, one of his coworkers was a guy named Dickey Dugan, which is, I mean, a name, obviously, like how can you not remember the name Dickey Dugan?
00:07:18
Speaker
And Dickie Dugan continued his career in fast food and ended up over at the Kentucky Fried Chicken that was down the hill from Howdy Beef and Burger. And he ended up at the Kentucky Fried Chicken and he rose to manager.
00:07:35
Speaker
And so my father had maintained a friendship with him from when he was coworkers with him at Howdy Beefenberger. And so when his kids needed a summer job, he called up Dickey Dugan and he asked if Dickey Dugan could hire us. And so both my brother and I worked at Kentucky Fried Chicken during the summers from, I think I worked there when I was 14 in the summer and 15, actually 14, 15 and 16. So I worked there for three summers.
00:08:01
Speaker
You know, people don't know like the difference between a keel and a breast, but I know the difference between that. And also back then, by the way, the other thing was that you didn't have the fancy cash registers.
00:08:11
Speaker
So now you just press whatever on the cash register, it kind of tells you and it tells you the change. So I remember, well, the first thing was that before you were allowed to work the cash register, which you really wanted to do because it was kind of gross back. So it was very, you know, we have to remember this was a long time ago, so this is going to sound super sexist. But basically all the male workers were back in the kitchen actually like putting the chicken in the fryers and stuff.
00:08:38
Speaker
And they would put that then to, there was like sort of a dividing area and then that would get passed up to the women, which would do one of two things. The women would either be, you could see them through the window behind the cashiers, but they would actually be packing the meal. So when someone ordered like a two piece or whatever, like they would pack the meal up.
00:08:58
Speaker
Or you could be, you could operate the cash register. And the cash register was a lot nicer because it was a lot cooler and we had to wear these horrible brown polyester suits, which were like so horrifically ugly, with like a cap and stuff. Like everybody should look online and look at like, this was in the like the early 80s and they should say like Kentucky Fried Chicken, you know, uniform 1980 and imagine me wearing one of those. It was crazy.
00:09:27
Speaker
So you always want to be up at the cash register. But you couldn't be at the cash register until you had memorized the price of every single thing on the menu. Because it wasn't on the cash register, and they didn't want you looking behind at the board. So you had to have memorized that. So I took the menu home and studied it, and then you would get quizzed. And until you could pass and know the price of every single thing, you weren't allowed to be at the cash register. But I made it to the cash register. That's what I want to say.
Decision-Making Metaphors and Strategies
00:09:57
Speaker
The thing that I think is so powerful and this is really woven through all of my work is is the uncertainty that it's not deterministic. You don't know what the next card is that's going to be dealt when you're making. I think it's just, you know, first of all, it's a metaphor for life. Right. But it's definitely a model for decision making because we don't know what the card next card is that's going to be dealt. I think that, you know, obviously a lot of the cognitive bias literature shows that we we think that much more than we should.
00:10:25
Speaker
We think that our decisions are much more deterministic than they are, that we do know how life is going to turn out and how things are going to be tomorrow. But it's not true. When I'm dealing off of a deck, I don't know what the next card is going to be. It could be one of any 52 cards if I'm taking, if I'm dealing the first card. And when I'm thinking about what my decisions are going to be, I have to take that into account. So I have to plan for
00:10:54
Speaker
a whole bunch of different cards that could come. And if I'm not doing that, I can't make really good decisions. What I find really interesting about the coronavirus and what's happening with the pandemic is that I think it's become much more clear to people right now that we aren't as much masters of our own destiny as we'd like to kind of think we are, that we don't control the next cards that are going to be dealt.
00:11:20
Speaker
And that when we're making decisions, we have to kind of deal with that. And I think that's the thing. Obviously, all the things that I was doing in terms of playing games and whatnot when I was young, I think really prepared me for that type of thinking. I guess it's a little bit of a chicken and egg problem though, because maybe I just really liked being in those types of environments.
00:11:44
Speaker
and that's what attracted me to it. Or maybe they taught me how to deal with those types of environments. I guess we're not gonna know that, but I think that's really the thing that was so attractive to me about it.
00:11:57
Speaker
So in this new book, I have a whole chapter of chapter seven that's dedicated to analysis paralysis and how to overcome it. So I think that's probably what I was having in terms of the conversation with Seth at the time, which is that this need for certainty, this need to feel like we can be sure. And then we can somehow guarantee the outcome, this imagining of the regret we're going to feel if it turns out poorly.
00:12:26
Speaker
that horrible feeling of, you know, I can't believe I've made a mistake, you know, that makes us get into these endless loops of seeking more information and trying to become more, you know, certain as if we can get to a hundred percent in terms of the defense against a bad outcome happening, slows us down so much. And of course you can't do that.
00:12:52
Speaker
you know, even if you get yourself to where 90% of the time you think you're gonna get a good outcome, 10% of the time you're gonna get a bad one. And that 10% of the time is gonna happen, you know, you don't know when it will happen, but it's gonna happen 10% of the time. And the fact that we, first of all, try to defend against that, right, really slows us down. But the other thing is that the fact that when that 10% happens, we automatically think that the decision was stupid.
00:13:20
Speaker
Right. And, and we shouldn't have made it is I think one of the biggest problems that we have as decision makers, because we can imagine that feeling so clearly. And so then we want to get from 10% of the time, we're going to have a bad outcome to 5% to 3% to 2% to 1%. And we end up not only.
00:13:40
Speaker
wasting a lot of time trying to chase something that's completely impossible because you can't actually, you can't actually ever guarantee the outcome that you're going to get anyway. But also, I think we cause ourselves so much anxiety before we make the decision and anxiety about that feeling of what if I get it wrong, if wrong is defined by, you know, the queen of clubs hitting, you know, just a bad outcome. Like, I don't like my job that I just took. If that's the way we find wrong, we have a lot of anxiety trying to defend against that.
00:14:09
Speaker
And then there's just the lack of self-compassion, you know, when it doesn't work out well. And the amount of beating ourselves up, we do. And I think all that ends up making us take way too much time on most of the decisions that we have. And it's particularly a problem right now, I think, because there is so much information that's available to us, like at our fingertips, that we get into this illusion that we can somehow
00:14:36
Speaker
you know, look at that last trip advisor review, you know, look up this last bit of data, run it past our Slack group one more time, you know, look on Yelp again, all the ratings, you know, whatever. It's just like, it's such an information overload that gives us the anxiety. I think it just increases our anxiety because it makes us feel that there's more that we should know that's going to get us to certainty. And it's just all a total illusion.
00:15:05
Speaker
One of the best ways is there's kind of three big frameworks that you can use to think about how to get out of that kind of paralysis place where you're just like in this endless information seeking loop.
00:15:18
Speaker
So understand that there's something called the time accuracy trade-off, which is for most decisions, not all, but for most, if you take more time with a decision, you should actually make a more accurate decision. And by accurate, what I mean is that if you take less time, really what you're sacrificing by gaining some time is that you might increase the chances that you get an outcome that you don't like.
00:15:46
Speaker
That's basically what's happening, right? So the idea is if you take more time, maybe you can reduce the chances of getting a bad outcome. You can't guarantee that you don't, but you might be reducing that chance. So that would be if you slow down. But if you speed up, you might be increasing the chances.
00:16:00
Speaker
that you get an outcome that you don't like. So that kind of gives us the first clue once we kind of understand that as to how you might speed your decision making up, which is to think about it from this frame. Let's say that I got a bad outcome. Is it really that bad? Let's think about an example like that. So I'm sure that you know, maybe you're one of these people. I don't know. But I'm sure you know somebody or many people who, when you go to restaurants with them,
00:16:31
Speaker
take like 15 minutes trying to order and they're asking everybody at the table, what are you going to have? Right. Skip me. I'll go last. I still have to think about it. That's a good one. Yeah. And then, and then when it finally gets to them, they're asking the waitress to like tell them every dish on the menu, you know, it's just like really.
00:16:48
Speaker
So it turns out that the average person takes, I think, something like 14 minutes with a menu, which is quite a long time. So this is something where they're really going through this analysis process, and you can see why. If they order their dish and it comes back and they don't like it, then they're like, ah, I made a mistake. Why did I order that? That was so stupid.
00:17:05
Speaker
It's like, not really, because you don't have a time machine. And the thing you really would need is a time machine so that you could go see how the future version of you likes that food and you don't have that. So maybe you should be yourself up so much. But regardless of that, we can now think about this. OK, so let's say that we did go fast. And the chances that we got a meal that we didn't like increased. Let's imagine we get a bad meal.
00:17:31
Speaker
How bad is it? And here's the way that we get to that. So Brendan, let's say that we ate together and you ordered something and it was yucky. It was really terrible. All right, so now imagine that I see you a year later and say, hey, Brendan, nice to see you. I haven't seen you in a year. Do you remember that meal that we had a year ago when you ordered that chicken? It was like really dry. You didn't even finish it. It was pretty gross.
00:18:00
Speaker
How much of an effect did that meal have on your happiness today? Okay, how about if I see you in a month and I say, hey, remember that meal we had a month ago and the chicken was pretty dry? How much of an effect did that have on your happiness today? And I'm imagining the answer would be pretty much the same if I saw you in a week.
00:18:17
Speaker
So this is something I call a happiness test. And what it tells you is that that decision that you're taking so long on, that you're having so much anxiety on that you're saying everybody better go before me, and then you're quizzing the waitress on, even if you were to get a pretty bad outcome, it wouldn't matter one tiny bit. So if that's the case, then just don't take very much time on the decision.
00:18:42
Speaker
you know, sort the menu into here's some stuff that I like, here's the stuff that I don't like, okay, I'm going to look at the stuff that I like and I'm going to kind of flip a coin or I'm going to go with my gut or, you know, I'm going to spend very little time on that decision because even if it turns out not to be very good, it just doesn't really matter very much. Okay, so that's one thing that you can think about, right? The next thing that you can think about is
00:19:06
Speaker
It may be something that may have some impact, but you can ask another question, which is, if the world isn't turning out the way that I had hoped, can I change my mind? Can I quit? Can I go do something else? Can I get off the path that I want?
The Art of Quitting and Decision Flexibility
00:19:24
Speaker
So this goes into the category of what
00:19:27
Speaker
you know, what Jeff Bezos calls two-way door decisions. We have one-way door and two-way door decisions. And you're just asking, is it a door that I can walk back through? So a good way to think about that is like a date is really quitable, right? If I go on a date with someone and I don't like it, I don't have to go on another date with them again. I can just quit. I can quit that person. I could even quit like in the middle of the date. I don't have to finish the date.
00:19:54
Speaker
I could say, oh, I'm sorry, I have an emergency. I have to go. The emergency being, I don't like the state. But marriage is obviously a much less quitable choice. It's hard to unwind that. Trying a bunch of internships, pretty quitable. Getting a job where now you have
00:20:14
Speaker
where you have financial responsibilities and whatnot. You can quit jobs, but it's a little bit more difficult to do so. Renting versus buying. Renting, it's pretty easy to get out of a lease. It's not as easy to get out of a house that you have bought.
00:20:29
Speaker
So when we sort of realize that something is more quitable, then we can really speed our decisions up. And this is true for both small decisions and big ones. And the reason why we can speed our decisions up is because you can kind of undo the bad thing that's happening. So if you take a small decision, people spend a lot of time trying to decide what to watch on Netflix, because I think they're thinking like, oh, I'm going to commit to the show. Like I'm going to choose a show that maybe I have to watch the whole series.
00:20:59
Speaker
But instead, if you say, wait a minute, that's not true. I can just try the show. And if I don't like it, I can quit watching it after 15 minutes. Right. Same thing with reading a book. Actually, I wrote a piece for something which was like, how do you decide what to read? And I said, well, the first thing I do is I realize I don't have to read the whole thing.
00:21:17
Speaker
because I can just quit. If I don't like it, I can just quit. And I think that if people thought about that, first of all, for small decisions, because people do spend a lot of time trying to decide what to watch on Netflix or what to read, and they actually realize, wait a minute, if I don't like it, I can quit. And maybe the best information that I can get would be from actually just trying it out. And so let me not get into this analysis paralysis and look at all these reviews and research the series online. Why don't I just try an episode and see how I feel about it?
00:21:47
Speaker
that can actually really speed you up. But that's true for big decisions as well. So people will get hung up on things like a college decision because they'll think about that as a four-year decision. But once you start being quit-tuitive in this way, you know, and looking at the lens of quitting, through the lens of quitting, you realize, oh, wait a minute, 37% of people who go to college transfer in the first year to a different college.
00:22:13
Speaker
So instead of thinking about this as a final decision, let me sort of think about what's the cost to me to transfer, right? And can I bear that cost? So, you know, it might be, you know, maybe some of your credits don't transfer and you'd have to sort of think about what that cost is, or maybe you're worried about, you know, having to make new friendships, that would be a cost. You know, maybe the relocation, maybe the,
00:22:40
Speaker
You know maybe you're getting a scholarship at the school that you're at and you need to find out could you get a scholarship at another school that you want to transfer to but notice that it really changes the decision. Because instead of saying i'm trying to make this decision trying to figure out if i'm gonna be happy at this place for the next four years it's more this is the college that seems right for me right now.
00:23:03
Speaker
But then I'm gonna find out a bunch of information about whether it is the college for me, which I can't really know until I go there. And so let me actually think in advance about the option to quit and go somewhere else and what the costs of that are. And now I can sort of figure out, is that a cost that I can bear? And that will generally speed your decision making up once you start looking at decisions through that lens.
00:23:31
Speaker
basically set a decision deadline. What I mean by that is like, as an example, so so let's take the problem of, we'll stick with stuff too long, right? So we have this sunk cost problem. And once we feel like we've got a lot of time invested in something, even when doing something else would be more fruitful, well, very often, sort of, as they say, you know, chase good
00:23:58
Speaker
good money after bad, right? Trying to sort of protect the resources that we've already spent on something even though it's proving not to be fruitful. This is actually a problem for poker players a lot because once they start losing in a game, it's very hard to get them to quit because they're trying to get their money back. And it doesn't matter so much that you're telling them this isn't a good situation for you to be in and probably you're actually not winning. You're probably not going to win in this game because you're not playing very well or whatever.
00:24:29
Speaker
it's hard to get them to quit, which is really kind of in that sunk cost problem. So one of the things you can do is sort of set a deadline, which could be by time or it could be by some benchmark, where at that point you will quit and you decide that in advance. So in poker, if I could say, I know that I won't play well after six hours. So no matter what's happened after six hours, I will quit. Or I could say, I know I'm not going to play well after I lose a certain amount of money.
00:24:58
Speaker
And so after that certain amount of money, I will quit. And you can do that with decisions as well. Like if I have a kid who's going to take piano lessons, I don't really want them to quit after half a lesson because they don't know enough about, they're not going to have enough information to know whether they really like the piano lesson. But what I would want to think about is how many lessons do I think it will take before it's reasonable?
00:25:25
Speaker
for them to quit and just sort of set that deadline. So you want to sort of set these deadlines on yourself and then say under what circumstances would I say that it's okay to quit? So you can sort of set up signposts for yourself. If there's certain signals happening in the world under those conditions, I would definitely quit. So this allows you to anticipate the dip.
00:25:50
Speaker
Right? Because as you're thinking about that, and you're saying, what are the things that might make my quitting decisions really bad? It could be things were going really great. And then, I don't know, kind of started to slow down. And, you know, I was, I sort of got caught in this, in, you know, yeah, you know, in a situation where I started to sort of realize I didn't know a lot, or I didn't feel like I was making progress.
00:26:16
Speaker
And I could think that that was actually a signal to quit when, when it isn't. So how long am I going to give that? I don't want to do it when it just happens. What I want to do is figure out how long do I give it when I'm in that situation before I'm actually going to allow myself the decision to quit. Right. Well, that that's a little bit, you know, I mean, setting these parameters are going to put you into a more objective place.
00:26:39
Speaker
But obviously, yeah, the input into all of these things is always going to be subjective. So you need to
Techniques for Better Decision-Making
00:26:48
Speaker
realize that. But if you have a good process where you're really trying to work through, like, for example, if you're in the dip, you can just go through the exercise, which is this is an outside view exercise, as you just said, which is sort of getting outside of the gravity well that you happen to be sitting in right then, is you can say,
00:27:07
Speaker
what's my timeline for feeling like I'm not going to want to do this anymore? And you can say, oh, whatever that timeline is. So let's say it's a year or it's six months, whatever. Let's say it's a year and you imagine, okay, let's imagine it's a year from now and I haven't made any significant progress. Why do I think that is? So that would be called a pre-mortem, right? It's imagining that you failed and then try to look back
00:27:33
Speaker
you know, over that time and say, what are the things that happened that made me fail? And then you can do the other thing, which is imagine it's a year from now and I came through it and I jumped the chasm and now everything's going great. Why do I think that that happened?
00:27:50
Speaker
And so the first thing is called a pre-mortem. So we do a lot of post-mortems where we'll look after the failure and say, why did that happen? This is doing that before you've actually failed so that you can do something about it. And the other one is called a backcast, which is standing in a positive future where you've succeeded and you've worked your way through it and now you're looking back to figure out why.
00:28:11
Speaker
So now, once you have those two sides of the puzzle, you can put them together, and that gives you a pretty complete view of what the possibilities are for that year. Now, it's particularly helpful when you have that information to also find a trusted outside advisor. Explain to them the situation. Don't show them the output of your own premortem.
00:28:33
Speaker
because that would bias them. And just saying here, this is my situation, this is the path that's gotten me here, and this is where I am today.
00:28:42
Speaker
And I feel like I've hit a little bit of a wall. So could you also do this exercise as an outside observer? And imagine that I've succeeded, and what do you think are the things that I would have done? And imagine that I have failed, and what are the things that happened, either the bad luck or the decisions that I would have made, and have them do that as well.
00:29:03
Speaker
So now the first thing is that you can look at your own and you can see, oh, that's interesting. I can see the actions and the things that would have happened in the world that would have made me succeed. So let me try to figure out what can I do to make sure that I'm doing those actions.
00:29:20
Speaker
What can I do to make sure that I end up on those branches of the tree? What can I do to make sure that maybe that luck goes my way? How can I notice that things are starting to go my way? Because you're going to see that. And then you're also going to see, OK, here are the decisions I don't want to make. How can I make sure that I'm not making them?
00:29:37
Speaker
how can I look at this bad luck that might happen and do something about it in advance? So that's what you're doing with your own, but then you can compare it with the person whose feedback you're seeking and you're going to see that there's going to be a lot of differences there.
00:29:50
Speaker
And don't spend a lot of time talking about the places you agree. That's kind of uninteresting. What you should do is say, oh, you see this whole different route to failure, or you see this whole other route to success that I hadn't noticed. Can I understand why you believe that? Why do you believe that that's a way that I might fail? Because I didn't see that. Why do you believe that that's a way that I might succeed?
00:30:13
Speaker
And they're going to open up different information, like they're going to show you different facts, they're going to show you a different perspective on your own situation that you otherwise wouldn't necessarily be exploring. And that's the way to figure out, you know, should I bother?
00:30:31
Speaker
Is this really a dip or is it just this thing isn't for me? Because if you can't find a lot of paths to success in that back cast, and if you're outside advisor can't find a lot of paths to success in that back cast, then that's a good clue that it's not just a dip.
00:30:51
Speaker
But either way, if you do decide it's not just a dip, you now can free up your time to go do something that would be more fruitful. And if you do say it's just a dip, you've now created a roadmap for yourself to speed up your ability to get out of it.
00:31:09
Speaker
So most people actually are the opposite of you and they have a much too rosy view of the future. Most people have suffered from something called illusion of control, which is this belief that you have much more control over your outcomes than you actually do.
00:31:26
Speaker
There's all there's just all sorts of things like this. There's like gamblers fallacy that, you know, if some good things have happened to you that you think they're really likely to happen to you again in the future. That's obviously a rosier view of the world. And we just a lot of the biases that we had like overconfidence bias, they tend to be kind of optimism biases.
00:31:44
Speaker
Um, there's something called the better than average effect, which is, you know, if you ask, uh, middle schoolers where they think they rank in social skills, you know, they're all, they're all say they're in like the top 10%. And obviously that's impossible because they have to go across the whole thing. I think college professors generally rate themselves about in the one top 1% of teaching ability. So there you go.
00:32:06
Speaker
So this is, you know, I think 50% of drivers put themselves in the top quartile for driving skill. You know, so there's all these like better than average effects, like an overconfidence and this kind of stuff. So mostly people have rosier views of the future than they actually should.
00:32:22
Speaker
And then there's some people like you who are pessimists by nature and have a darker view of the future than you probably actually should. So pre-mortems and backcasts actually work to help both types of people because it gets you to a much more complete view.
00:32:40
Speaker
If you're somebody who generally has a too rosy view of the future, you can see how a pre-mortem is going to be a really good exercise for you because the whole point of it is to explore the ways in which you have failed. Not just in terms of your own decision making, but also in terms of the way that luck might get in the way.
00:32:57
Speaker
And if you think about why you might be too rosy about the future it's that you're not you're not you're imagining that bad luck isn't going to have the same effect on you that it might have on other people and that your decisions are going to control your destiny maybe a little bit more than they are.
00:33:12
Speaker
So noticing that bad luck is going to be really good. But then on the decision side, you're going to see all the bad decisions that you as a human being are likely to make that might actually cause you to fail. So that's obviously really good for people who are too rosy. And the back cast for people like you is really good because it shows you, no, there's lots of luck that can go your way. And there's actually lots of great decisions that can actually create much better outcomes for yourself that can actually really increase the probability that you succeed.
00:33:41
Speaker
And now you've seen the road map.
00:33:43
Speaker
to how you might do that. Now you've created for yourself a set of decisions that you really want to make sure that you're making, a set of actions that you want to take that are going to allow you to actually get to that success. And you're going to end up with much more belief that you can do it. When you do these exercises and explore these futures, even the ones that might be uncomfortable, like the pre-mortems, that's actually the route to achieving that really positive future that you're trying to get to.
00:34:16
Speaker
Yeah, so this is called resulting. And this is actually, it's a bias that really plagues us. I have to say this, this, you know, so I think about these, you know, the visual illusions, so, which I'm sure you've seen a lot of them, like, there's one, there's been one going around on the internet recently, which is like, there's
00:34:34
Speaker
you know, how you can draw cubes, you know, just like drawings of cubes. So there's two cubes that are side by side, and the background is flashing a color. And it makes it seem like the cubes are spinning. But of course, the cubes aren't spinning, right? This is a visual illusion. What's interesting about it is that you just can't unsee it, right? It doesn't matter how much I say to you, hey, you know, you can actually put your hands and make it so that you can't see that background. And you'll see that it's not
00:35:02
Speaker
spinning. And I can show you that it's not spinning, but when you're looking at it, you can't not see it. The cubes just spin nonetheless.
00:35:10
Speaker
And I think about some of these things resulting as very similarly as a cognitive illusion that you can't unsee. So the interesting thing with the Seahawks example is, OK, so the Seahawks are on the one yard line of the Patriots. It's the fourth quarter. There's 26 seconds left in the whole game. So they get down to the one yard line. It's second down, 26 seconds left.
00:35:37
Speaker
Obviously, they have to score a touchdown because they're down by four. They have three downs that they could do it in. Except, of course, they have a problem because they only have 26 seconds left and they only have one timeout. So there's a clock problem in terms of being able to get three cracks at the end zone here.
00:35:53
Speaker
So just as you said, there was a really strong expectation of people that Pete Carroll was going to call for that ball to get handed off to Marshawn Lynch. But he doesn't do that. He ends up passing the ball. Well, not him personally, but Russell Wilson passes the ball. And of course, we know it was very famously intercepted. This is something where still to this day, people say this was the dumbest call in all of Super Bowl history, what a ridiculous call.
00:36:23
Speaker
So I'm not going to bore people. But if you do the math, it actually turns out that it was a very good call. And the simple clue that I'll give you here is that, as I said, it was second down. So they had three downs to try to get to the end zone. But they have a clock management problem because they only have one timeout. So I just assume everybody would agree that if you're playing against the Patriots, you'd like to have three tries to score as opposed to two. I mean, they are the Patriots.
00:36:52
Speaker
And so the extra down would be really helpful. And so the very simple way to think about it, it's a more complicated problem than this. But the simple way to think about it is if you hand it off to Marshawn Lynch twice, you only get two plays. Because if he fails on the first time, obviously the clock runs and you have to burn your time out. And then if you hand it off to him again, clock is going to run out if he fails and you're not actually going to be able to get to a third play. But if you pass the ball on either first or second down,
00:37:20
Speaker
you know, if that play fails in the usual way, which is an incomplete pass, the clock stops for you. And that's going to give you a chance for those two running plays where if, if March on Lynch fails on the first try, you can call the timeout. So it seems like if you call a pass play on the first or second try, then you're going to get an extra shot at the end zone, which is really valuable. Of course, there's a cost to that, which is the chances of an interception, which turned out to be less than 2%. So I kind of can walk through that with you.
00:37:51
Speaker
And most people, when I walk through that, not everybody, but most people can kind of see the logic of that. And they can see that maybe it wasn't the worst call in Super Bowl history. But then when I actually query them on it, they say, yeah, yeah, I understand that. But I still think it was the worst call in Super Bowl history. And it's like, what is going on there? Because I just explained to them what the math was. And if I do the thought experiment with them, and I say, well, let me ask you this. What if the ball had been caught for the game-winning touchdown?
00:38:21
Speaker
Then what would you think? And then they say, well, that would have been the best call in Super Bowl history. Took guts, bold call. That would be amazing. And I'm like, well, you understand the decision was the same either way. And they can't quite get their mind around that in the same way that you can't help but see that cube spin.
00:38:39
Speaker
So I really think about these like in the same category. And I would say like that it's one of the biggest problems because if you want to learn from your experience, then you have to actually understand what your experience has to tell you.
00:38:52
Speaker
And trust me, there's a billion places in your life where you're misjudging Pete Carroll's play, but it's like your own decision that you're misjudging and you're taking the wrong lessons from it. I mean, this is, you know, obviously this is a topic that I go pretty deeply in and thinking in bets, but, um, I actually opened the very first chapter in how to decide, it's just a lot of tools for how do you think through this problem and start reducing the impact of resulting in your own life.
00:39:21
Speaker
so that you don't end up making these kinds of errors. And you can kind of unsee that spinning cube a little bit better.
Decision Quality vs. Luck
00:39:30
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is what it comes down to, Brendan. There's two things that determine how your life turns out last time I checked. Luck, which by definition you can't do anything about. It's a force that acts upon you. That's just definitionally true. And the quality of your decisions, right? Like I can't control who I was born to.
00:39:51
Speaker
you know, or where I was born, or when I was born, or I can't control how tall I ended up being. That's just not something that's in my control. You know, I could have been born in the 1600s, you know, obviously, my life would have been really differently, different than instead of being able to own property, I think I would have been property then, I'm pretty sure.
00:40:12
Speaker
I think women weren't allowed to own property and then in some places they were property. So obviously it's really different that I was born in a time when by the time I was an adult human, the kinds of things that women were allowed to do, the spaces that women were let into was really, really different. That obviously had nothing to do with me.
00:40:37
Speaker
So it has a huge influence on my life, but it's not anything that I had any control over. What I have control over is the quality of my decisions. So when we think about how does your life turn out, and the fact that there are two factors in that, there's only one of those two factors that I can do anything about. So from my perspective, you should be really, really hungry
00:41:05
Speaker
Like dedicated, you know, this should be your sole focus in life is to improve the quality of your decisions because it's the thing that you can actually control. It's the thing that you can actually get better at. I can't get better at luck. I don't even know what that means. I can get better at my decision-making. And that is going to have a cumulative effect over time, which is going to allow you to have better outcomes.
00:41:29
Speaker
So I live this, I write books on it, this is what my work is in terms of my business life. And then I co-founded a nonprofit called the Alliance for Decision Education, which is trying to bring decision education into K through 12 curricula for just this reason. Because I think that if children were taught how to make better decisions, if this was a skill that we were really delivering to our kids,
00:41:56
Speaker
Their lives would be better and society would be better off for it. So I'm very passionate about this. My goodness, thank you to Annie Duke. She is a fun person and wicked smart.
Podcast Reflections and Guest Highlighting
00:42:14
Speaker
Once we were done recording, we talked about how we both more or less lost our New England accents.
00:42:21
Speaker
as i still had it recording but he had included in this it was a it was really fun issues on this publicity blitz the day we spoke several weeks ago at this point so to just hang out in in chat after afterwards was really cool
00:42:37
Speaker
I'd say I'd love to have her as a frequent flyer on the CNF and airliner here. I mean, why not? I mean, she's a busy person and super famous, so maybe not. It's not. What could go wrong? What's to lose by asking? Okay, so I'm sure you notice something new.
00:43:00
Speaker
You probably were like, what the hell are you doing, B.O.? You're right. I edited myself out completely from the interview portion of the show. It's something I've always wanted to do, and I figured it was either going to be for Annie or Seth Godin, and I had already edited Seth before I had the courage to do what I did with the Annie edit.
00:43:27
Speaker
I did it for a few reasons, several reasons actually. So strap in. You might as well, you can hit pause, maybe go get a nice tea. I've got myself a athletic brewing, non-alcoholic, run wild IPA. It's delicious. One, here are my reasons. One, cuts down on time. Probably save six to seven minutes, easily.
00:43:54
Speaker
Two, puts more focus on the guest, obviously. Three, I think you're smart enough to infer the question I ask based on the answer the guest gives. Four, hosts talk too much during interviews, during the interview portion. I have a decent shot clock around this. I try not to speak for more than 30 seconds when I'm asking a question.
00:44:21
Speaker
But many hosts annoy the hell out of me by how much they talk because they think they want to hear themselves talk. Like I've grown very, very, very sensitive to how long interviewers ramble, how they ask a question and then keep rambling, then basically answer the question for the guest. And then by the time they're done rambling, have started to ask an entirely different question than the one they started with drives me crazy.
00:44:52
Speaker
There's a rant. Five, you're here for the guest on this show anyway. This is a guest driven show. So I'm not Mark Maron of course. Though this postscript is Maron-esque. But I like to think that I have the decency at this point to respect your time enough to put it at the end of the show.
00:45:14
Speaker
So now I'm not in the way anymore. You know when I put this ranty thing at the start of the show which even as short as maybe six weeks ago this would have been at the front and
00:45:27
Speaker
It would be like that guy who corners you at a dinner party when you're on your way to the bar. You can't get away from him and you can see the bar. It's right over there and all you want is a damn refill. But Brendan's introduction has pinned you to the wall and you feel sort of rude to hit the skip ahead button.
00:45:49
Speaker
So you just go to the bar and you hit the skip bar anyway and ultimately you're glad you did it because not only is there great beer, wine and liquor at the bar but there's this great homemade bruschetta and it's got real raw garlic in your thinking. If I eat enough of this I won't have to talk to him anymore because my breath will be so offensive.
00:46:16
Speaker
right and in any case I've another thing I'm very very guilty of this when I think I've asked a good question and I know what I know at this point that I ask good questions like shit like I should know yeah I really come on been doing this long enough
00:46:37
Speaker
I want you to, it's like if I ask a good question, I wanted you to hear it. And when the guest says, oh that's a great question, I don't edit that out. I mean sometimes I do, but I usually don't. I don't edit it out because I'm so insecure that I want you to know that the guest thinks I'm smart as some shit. So it kind of like validates.
00:46:55
Speaker
Your time that you're spending like oh that person who's really smart and cool and awesome They're like whoa they he said son. They thought Brendan said something really smart, so Okay, my time is worth this so anyway I Just cut myself out of the equation. I might keep doing this I might refine it with a little extra music here and there just to change it up and
00:47:21
Speaker
You know, same punk metal music as the bridge where I would be normally asking a question. Gotta stay on brand, man. But I'm happy with the risk I took and how it turned out. I'd love to know what you think. In the meantime, I've already cracked open a nice non-alcoholic IPA, which I love, and I'm just gonna tell you, it's a magical world out there seeing efforts. Let's go exploring. See ya!
00:48:22
Speaker
you