How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices by Annie Duke (PDF)

Description

Through a blend of compelling exercises, illustrations, and stories, the bestselling author of Thinking in Bets will train you to combat your own biases, address your weaknesses, and help you become a better and more confident decision-maker.What do you do when you’re faced with a big decision? If you’re like most people, you probably make a pro and con list, spend a lot of time obsessing about decisions that didn’t work out, get caught in analysis paralysis, endlessly seek other people’s opinions to find just that little bit of extra information that might make you sure, and finally go with your gut. What if there was a better way to make quality decisions so you can think clearly, feel more confident, second-guess yourself less, and ultimately be more decisive and be more productive? Making good decisions doesn’t have to be a series of endless guesswork. Rather, it’s a teachable skill that anyone can sharpen. In How to Decide, bestselling author Annie Duke and former professional poker player lays out a series of tools anyone can use to make better decisions. You’ll learn: • To identify and dismantle hidden biases. • To extract the highest quality feedback from those whose advice you seek. • To more accurately identify the influence of luck in the outcome of your decisions. • When to decide fast, when to decide slow, and when to decide in advance. • To make decisions that more effectively help you to realize your goals and live your values.Through interactive exercises and engaging thought experiments, this book helps you analyze key decisions you’ve made in the past and troubleshoot those you’re making in the future. Whether you’re picking investments, evaluating a job offer, or trying to figure out your romantic life, How to Decide is the key to happier outcomes and fewer regrets.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐How your life turns out, both in business and in your private life, is based on two factors: good decisions and luck. And you only have control over one of those factors – good decisions. As such, investing time and energy in improving your ability to decide more effectively, has to be a very valuable investment. That is undeniable. However, the most accessible decision tools are too simplistic or too flawed, and the best tend to being too complicated or tiresome.Amazon lists over 80,000 books on decision making and decision theory. In my opinion this book is probably as good as they get. It combines simplicity of use with profound insights, made simple.Author Annie Duke, was a PhD student in cognitive science. She was a professional poker player, a World Series of Poker ‘gold bracelet’ holder, who used to be the leading female money winner in WSOP history. She now trains people in decision making. This is more than a biographical note, it informs her understanding of risk and decisions.Ask any executive, who is paid for little else other than making good decisions, what they really do in this area, and you will probably get one or more of these replies. “Ideally, I follow the consensus of a committee”; “I weigh the alternatives carefully – a pros and cons list”; “After thought and information-gathering – I go with my gut.”Consensus is a very flawed process, as is developing a pros and cons list, and the gut is fickle.A good decision tool, like any other good tool has key characteristics. What makes Duke’s method a good tool is that it qualifies on all the important characteristics.A good tool must be able to be used reliably, repeatedly. (Think of a screwdriver.) Used in the same way, you can expect to get the same results, and you can teach others to use it too.Duke combines general principles about decision making with very practical and accessible methods.Let me start with a general principle underlying judging for a good decision. Consider your purchase of share A which went up in value 20 times in two years. At the same time, you purchased equity B which has barely kept up with inflation.Most people will consider the good decision obvious. Equity A was a good decision and equity B, a bad one. This is a serious cognitive error called “Resulting” – the tendency to look at whether the result was good or bad to determine whether the decision was good or bad. Your decision to buy share A could have been a bad one that was successful through “dumb luck”. Your decision to by share B could have been a quality decision, that was a victim of “bad luck”.You listened to a rumour about share A and did serious work on share B. This distinction is critical to good decision-making because you would never wish to repeat the decision process that led you to the decision about equity A again. Outcomes cast a distorting shadow over the decision-making process.Hindsight often distorts by making us think that outcomes are predictable or inevitable. They are neither. It also leads to the distortion that ‘you should have known’, or that ‘you knew it all along’. This is called “memory creep” – the distortion that since you know it now, you knew it then. You probably didn’t.Decisions come in many levels of importance: some should be worked on and others, well, just do whatever…A simple tool is the “Happiness Test”. Ask yourself whether “the outcome of your decision, good or bad, will likely have a significant effect on your happiness in a year. If the answer is no, the decision passes the test, which means you can speed up,” Duke explains. You might even repeat this for a month or a week. In these situations, you can trade accuracy in favour of saving time.Duke is adamant that if a decision should be worked on, it must be done in writing. This has many advantages, the most important of which for the development of improved decision-making, is the ability to review what you thought at the time. This prevents the distortion that memory is prone to.The method starts with listing the options open to you. You then list all the potential outcomes you can think of, or that you can gather from others.It may soon become clear that you simply don’t have all the facts, and much is unknowable. You may conclude that you might as well simply ‘go with your gut’. That is an easy cop-out, but an unnecessary one. You do know much more than you think, so not making a decision based on any thinking, is lazy thinking.Duke notes that decision-making is like archery, in that it is ‘not all or nothing’. You don’t only get points for hitting the bull’s-eye, and for nothing else. Aiming for that bull’s-eye by making an educated guess, gets you closer to a precise hit. This is because it forces you to assess what you know and what you don’t know, and to learn more.Even if you ‘guess’, that is always better that surrendering to ‘don’t know’. All guesses are in fact ‘educated’ guesses and that gets you closer to knowing. The alternative is comparable to the children’s party game of pinning a tail on a picture of a donkey blindfolded.Duke’s method involves listing the range of possibilities for any decision. Then evaluating this in term of the likelihood of any one possibility occurring, and the impact that would have. Duke offers a lot of guidance to this process including the ‘shock test’.Consider this example. How much does a racing bike weigh? If you guessed that it could weigh between 1 kg and 100kg, you would be right. But as an ‘educated guess’ based on what you have heard or read, you might suggest between 5 and 15 kgs. What weight would shock you if you found this to be true? Weighing as little as 2kgs or as much as 20? From what you know, the range is not 1-100 kg. The shock test sorts that out and narrows options or consequences.This book is very practical, uncomplicated, and robust. It includes exercises and clear guidelines. You could even use the information I have shared above to make the decision as to whether to spend $20 and twelve hours on this book, to improve your ability to make important decisions.Readability Light -+— SeriousInsights High -+— LowPractical High +—- Low*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on strategy and implementation, is the author of ‘Strategy that Works’ and a public speaker. Views expressed are his own.

⭐Our lives are produced by the decisions we make: what we eat, read, watch, our exercising or not, our choosing to move or attend one college over another, one field of study over another, whom to befriend or marry or stay away from; all of this, the fabric of our lives is woven with the thread of our decisions. Whatever you want to do, whoever or however you want to be, you will get there by way of daily decisions.Terrified by the consequences of my decisions, I spent years deciding from-the-hip, regretting decisions which led to bad outcomes, and spending longer and longer trying not make the wrong choices. Under the weight of particularly oppressive analysis paralysis, I decided to pick up this book. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it drastically changed my relationship to decision-making, and made explainable the former mad god of consequences, providing the tools to face uncertainty with confidence.The outcome of your life relies in part on your decisions, and this book, if taken seriously, will improve the quality of your decisions.

⭐Annie makes a point of knowing the difference between low-impact and high-impact decisions.Annie cautions to Beware Hindsight Bias, as this assessment is based entirely on the decision’s outcome. It says little about the decision itself.& since we often forget the process that went into a decision, but we usually remember the result, most people miss the value of learning from those experiences. Annie emphasizes that it is always a mistake use the quality of a result to assess the quality of a decision. & further, it is a mistake not to consider the role of luck. In psychology, it’s also known as outcome bias. Annie calls this “Resulting” & warns that it leads to repeating the same errors or faulty decisions because we’re not assessing the decision-making process at all. We’re only looking at the outcome. Obviously, if we want to learn from our decisions, misremembering the facts after the outcome only confuses us on how we made the decision in the first place. Commonly, Hindsight bias had us convince ourselves that an outcome was obvious or predictable, but outcomes are very rarely inevitable.Also known as “creeping determinism” , the way we retrospectively understand our decisions is usuallya distoeted & revised recollection of what we knew when the decision was made.Annie’s antidote is to use aKNOWLEDGE TRACKER:You can’t learn from your decisions if you don’t gather sufficient data about them.Annie instructs us to document the information & logic of a decision as it is being made. Then to go back after the outcome & analyze what happened.By comparing this before-and-after knowledge, seeing what was missed or miscalculated. Gathering the data for many decisions, will reveal patterns. Eventually you can develop a sense of the common flags of biases signs and learn to spot them in real time.Assess your level of certainty:”Will” = 90-95% certain” more likely than not” just means greater than 50 percent certainty.” could happen” means 20%After you establish upper and lower constraints use something called a “shock test” –> ask yourself if you’d be shocked if your expected outcome ended up outside of this range.Some of these low-impact decisions qualify as freerolls – the drawbacks are few, but potential benefits are plentiful. You have nothing to lose, and won’t be any worse off afterward if things don’t work out.If a decision is High-Impact, Annie has a six-step method to reduce bias and make higher quality decisions.1.) List a realistic selection of potential outcomes.2.) identify the upsides and downsides of each particular outcome.3.) Estimate & quantify how likely each outcome is.4.) compare the probability of each outcome you like with those you dislike.5.) repeat the first four steps for all other considerations.6.) compare the preferences, payoffs, and probabilities of each option & decide We tend not to question our own beliefs since we collapse our identity with them. Questioning our beliefs means they could be wrong and therefore occur as a threat to our sense of self. Therefore we frequently refuse to acknowledge any bit of reality which is contradictory.Annie suggests using a “PERSPECTIVE TRACKER”:An accurate perspective comes from a blend of outside view and inside view. Our inside view is the world from our perspective, according to our intuition, and beliefs. The outside view, is the world as others perceive it. If you want an honest response when soliciting feedback, don’t disclose your own opinion first. The author describes this as quarantining your beliefs to avoid infecting others with your contagious opinion. Psychologists know this as the framing effect, a cognitive bias that occurs when the order in which information is introduced influences the way we, the recipient, interpret and judge that information.In group meeting allow everyone to turn in independent opinions first, then discuss. Rather than positive thinking, diligently identifying obstacles to a potential outcome can help you avoid them in the first place. Psychologist Gary Klein calls this a ” premortem”. This requires you to generate reasons for why a particular goal fails before it even begins.

⭐There is some good content in this book, observations about how people actually work and blur fact and imagined remembering when it comes to decisions, also a perspective on how to build, evaluate and improve a decision making process. This content is really valuable. However, there is much fluff and padding and some frankly really bland examples it feels almost insulting as an adult to read through the filler content. If the author cared to edit this more they’d get it down to a third of the size and much more hard hitting.

⭐The methods used are quite basic. There is a lot of “workshop” type of chapters. The result is that the insight is low, but the style is about you exploring where you go wrong. That works if you are operating from a position of knowing, but deeper insight into what causes decisions to be made would be useful.The matrix of good/bad decisions good/bad luck is quite a useful tool though.

⭐I just loved this book with practical solutions it gave on how to go about with decision making. We use all kinds of tools for decision making but they are outdated and inaccurate. What is told in this book if followed I think a person can improve their decision quality

⭐There is in fact little information about “how to decide” in this book. The content could be presented in less than 10 pages. The rest is just a very lengthly insult to the reader.

⭐Sehr wertvolle Gedankenhilfe für Entscheidungen in jeder Lebenssituation. Die Aufklärung über Fallen in rückschauenden Denkprozessen bzw Rekapitulationen hat mir außerordentlich gefallen. Ein absolut lesenswerter gut verständlicher Ratgeber.

⭐Not found.

Keywords

Free Download How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices in PDF format
How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices PDF Free Download
Download How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices PDF Free
How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices PDF Free Download
Download How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices PDF
Free Download Ebook How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices