Annie Duke Takes On The World
Hey everyone, Happy Monday and Happy Women’s day. Not that I need to have a reason or day to write about smart awesome women but writing about Annie seems apt for today!
Annie Duke, a former World Series of Poker champion turned business consultant, draws on examples from business, sports, politics, and (of course) poker to share tools anyone can use to embrace uncertainty and make better decisions. For most people, it's difficult to say 'I'm not sure' in a world that values and, even, rewards the appearance of. Join or Sign In. Sign in to customize your TV listings. Continue with Facebook Continue with email. By joining TV Guide, you agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge.
Annie Duke (@AnnieDuke) is a former professional poker player and author of multiple books like “Thinking in Bets: How to make smarter decisions when you don’t have all the facts.”
She has a very interesting background, from being a leading female money winner in the World Series of Poker for years to becoming a corporate speaker, strategic consultant, and author who is uniquely qualified to speak about high-level decision making and academics in the fields of psychology and cognitive theory. Annie understands the intersection of luck, skill, and making decisions in uncertain, chaotic environments better than most people on the planet.
1 STORY FROM HER
How did she get started?
She went to graduate school and was studying cognitive psychology, which includes how humans process information, how they learn and build models of the world, and where they go wrong and right. At the end of graduate school, a stomach illness put her in the hospital for two weeks. Along with recuperation time, She missed that season’s job talks for faculty positions. While waiting for the next interviewing season, She needed money. Her brother, who was already a professional poker player, suggested that she plays poker in the meantime, to support herself until she went back to become a professor. “The meantime” turned into 18 years.
Poker at that time was not glamorous in fact most people thought she had a gambling habit and wanted to know what her husband did for a living and would not believe when she said that she is the main financial supporter of the family. Most people actually suggested her to attend “gamblers anonymous” to get rid of the addiction.
How much of your own success has been impacted by luck as opposed to your own raw talent?
“I’ve always embraced the idea that how our lives turn out is the result of the combination of two influences: luck (the things outside our control) and the quality of our decisions. My life has been greatly affected by things outside my control. When I was born, where I was born, the family I was born into – those things just to start. For example, as a woman playing poker and in business, I’m sensitive to the fact that had I been born 100 years earlier, or even 20, the opportunities available to me would have been very different.
Luck may look “good” or “bad,” but it’s just the constant influence of things outside our control. For instance, if I hadn’t gotten sick in graduate school – a development I considered “bad luck” when it happened – everything that happened in my career after that (poker, speaking, consulting, writing) would have been different. I’ve tried to take advantage of whatever luck put in my path, but obviously, I’ve benefited from a lot of things outside my control.”
2 QUOTES FROM HER
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.”
“Despite the popular wisdom that we achieve success through positive visualization, it turns out that incorporating negative visualization makes us more likely to achieve our goals.”
Annie Duke Takes On The World As A
3 LEARNINGS FOR YOU
Seek people you disagree with
If we're going to improve our beliefs, we'll be better off if we include people and information sources we're likely to disagree with. Who better to raise the possibility that we're wrong, and the reasons?
To compound knowledge, we need to refrain from confirmation bias. It's all too easy to seek a group of people who share the same views as you, be it in investing or politics. Our views need to be challenged and destroyed from time to time to remove our biases. It's hard to learn from history, experience, and knowledge if you don't get challenged. Therefore, be skeptical of information that agrees with your viewpoint. Empirical evidence suggests that we are biased to accept conforming evidence (confirmation bias) more easily than conflicting evidence. Unfortunately, being intelligent just compounds the confirmation bias, according to Duke. It turns out the better you are with numbers, the better you are at spinning those numbers to conform to and support your beliefs.
Life is like poker and not chess
The problem with using chess as a model for the kinds of decisions that we make in life is that chess is a very constrained problem, meaning there just isn’t a lot of uncertainty in it. There is a very little bit of luck and there’s no hidden information in the sense that you can see all the pieces sitting right in front of you, so I have access to your whole position. Now, there are certain things I don’t have access to, like I don’t know what openings you’ve recently been studying, for example. As far as the pieces as they lay, I can see all of those. In terms of the luck element, there’s nobody rolling the dice, and then if it comes up nine, I get to take your bishop off the board, so there’s almost no luck in that game. What that means is that it’s a very different problem than most of the kinds of problems that we have to tackle in life.
Life is much more like poker where there is lots of hidden information, the cards are face-down and the relationship between your decision quality and the way that an outcome might turn out on a single try is actually quite loose.
New data, new decisions.
Mistakes, emotions, losing - those things are all inevitable because we are human. The approach of thinking in bets moved me toward objectivity, accuracy, and open-mindedness. That movement compounds over time to create significant changes in our lives.
The benefit is not immediate, but gradual. Duke says correctly that life is a perpetual state of learning and we must expect to change our opinions often, and learning means modifying opinions and ideas that previously were held for granted.
Travel Channel
Her book “Thinking in Bets” is amazing and a lot of what I have written here has been picked up from there. Do check it out if you want to make smarter decisions! My friend, Kalani Scarrott (@ScarrottKalani) has also made a “BizCard” on it which summarises “resulting” beautifully!
That’s it from me, until next time! Feel free to reach out to me by replying to this email or on twitter 👋
Also, if you have recently signed up or have missed reading a few before, you can check them out here or read my favorite one about Tim Ferriss here.
Do like or comment on the post, not for vanity purposes but purely as a feedback loop for me so I know what kind of people you want me to write about :)
- Shlok Gupta (@shlokafc)
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