Thinking in Bets

Whenever you make a decision, there are a set of possible outcomes: some favorable, some not so much. This book poses the question: “wanna bet?” on an outcome happening. The goal of this book is to strive towards more accurate decision-making through a variety of techniques, whilst recognizing the role luck plays in resulting outcomes.

Here are some of my favorite ideas from this book:

• The tendency for us to engage in “resulting”: evaluating the quality of our decisions by the quality of their outcomes, which discredits the role of luck.
• Groupthink is effective when devoid of judgment and in pursuit of accuracy, but is dangerous otherwise because it forms echo chambers.
• When backcasting (working backwards from an imagined future to figure out the next steps to take), pre-mortems are often more effective than positive visualizations.

And some practical takeaways:

• Before making an important decision, do a 10/10/10: what will my life look like 10 minutes from now? 10 months? 10 years?
• Zoom out and don’t be reactive. The outcomes of a particular decision can swing wildly positive or negative, but a good strategy for decision-making trends well over time.

I think it’s a book about logical fallacies disguised as a self-help book, which, is maybe what the self-help genre has been trying to help us see more clearly all along.