Top 60 Annie Duke Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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.”

— Annie Duke

2. “In most of our decisions, we are not betting against another person. Rather, we are betting against all the future versions of ourselves that we are not choosing.”

— Annie Duke

3. “Improving decision quality is about increasing our chances of good outcomes, not guaranteeing them.”

— Annie Duke

4. “Outcomes don’t tell us what’s our fault and what isn’t, what we should take credit for and what we shouldn’t. Unlike in chess, we can’t simply work backward from the quality of the outcome to determine the quality of our beliefs or decisions. This makes learning from outcomes a pretty haphazard process.”

— Annie Duke

5. “When we work toward belief calibration, we become less judgmental of ourselves.”

— Annie Duke

6. “Making better decisions starts with understanding this: uncertainty can work a lot of mischief.”

— Annie Duke

7. “Contrary to popular belief, winners quit a lot. That’s how they win.”

— Annie Duke

8. “Fake news works because people who already hold beliefs consistent with the story generally won’t question the evidence.”

— Annie Duke

9. “Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.”

— Annie Duke

10. “Self-serving bias has immediate and obvious consequences for our ability to learn from experience.”

— Annie Duke

11. “Chess, for all its strategic complexity, isn’t a great model for decision-making in life, where most of our decisions involve hidden information and a much greater influence of luck.”

— Annie Duke

12. “If you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth.”

— Annie Duke

13. “Experience can be an effective teacher. But, clearly, only some students listen to their teachers.”

— Annie Duke

14. “Certainly, in exchange for losing the fear of taking blame for bad outcomes, you also lose the unadulterated high of claiming good outcomes were 100% skill. That’s a trade you should take. Remember, losing feels about twice as bad as winning feels good; being wrong feels about twice as bad as being right feels good. We are in a better place when we don’t have to live at the edges. Euphoria or misery, with no choices in between, is not a very self-compassionate way to live.”

— Annie Duke

15. “Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.”

— Annie Duke

16. “If you feel like you’ve got a close call between quitting and persevering, it’s likely that quitting is the better choice.”

— Annie Duke

17. “They learned the lesson the ants have down pat: Don’t wait to be forced to quit to start exploring alternatives.”

— Annie Duke

18. “What is true for grit is true for optimism. Optimism gets you to stick to things that are worthwhile. But optimism also gets you to stick to things that are no longer worthwhile. And life’s too short to do that.”

— Annie Duke

19. “When you are weighing whether to quit something or stick with it, you can’t know for sure whether you can succeed at what you’re doing because that’s probabilistic. But there is a crucial difference between the two choices. Only one choice – the choice to persevere – lets you eventually find out the answer.”

— Annie Duke

20. “As Nietzsche points out, regret can do nothing to change what has already happened. We just wallow in remorse about something over which we no longer have any control. But if regret happened before a decision instead of after, the experience of regret might get us to change a choice likely to result in a bad outcome.”

— Annie Duke

21. “Even research communities of highly intelligent and well-meaning individuals can fall prey to confirmation bias, as IQ is positively correlated with the number of reasons people find to support their own side in an argument.”

— Annie Duke

22. “Over time, those world-class poker players taught me to understand what a bet really is: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. Treating decisions as bets, I discovered, helped me avoid common decision traps, learn from results in a more rational way, and keep emotions out of the process as much as possible.”

— Annie Duke

23. “We might think of ourselves as open-minded and capable of updating our beliefs based on new information, but the research conclusively shows otherwise. Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite, altering our interpretation of that information to fit our beliefs.”

— Annie Duke

24. “When someone asks you about a coin they flipped four times, there is a correct answer: “I’m not sure.”

— Annie Duke

25. “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

26. “As with visual illusions, we can’t make our minds work differently than they do no matter how smart we are. Just as we can’t unsee an illusion, intellect or willpower alone can’t make us resist motivated reasoning.”

— Annie Duke

27. “Forcing ourselves to express how sure we are of our beliefs brings to plain sight the probabilistic nature of those beliefs, that what we believe is almost never 100% or 0% accurate but, rather, somewhere in between.”

— Annie Duke

28. “Truthseeking, the desire to know the truth regardless of whether the truth aligns with the beliefs we currently hold, is not naturally supported by the way we process information. We might think of ourselves as open-minded and capable of updating our beliefs based on new information, but the research conclusively shows otherwise. Instead of altering our beliefs to fit new information, we do the opposite, altering our interpretation of that information to fit our beliefs.”

— Annie Duke

29. “Incorporating uncertainty into the way we think about our beliefs comes with many benefits. By expressing our level of confidence in what we believe, we are shifting our approach to how we view the world. Acknowledging uncertainty is the first step in measuring and narrowing it. Incorporating uncertainty in the way we think about what we believe creates open-mindedness, moving us closer to a more objective stance toward information that disagrees with us.”

— Annie Duke

30. “The secret is to make peace with walking around in a world where we recognize that we are not sure and that’s okay. As we learn more about how our brains operate, we recognize that we don’t perceive the world objectively. But our goal should be to try.”

— Annie Duke

31. “Identifying a negative outcome doesn’t have the same personal sting if you turn it into a positive by finding things to learn from it. You don’t have to be on the defensive side of every negative outcome because you can recognize, in addition to things you can improve, things you did well and things outside your control. You realize that not knowing is okay.”

— Annie Duke

32. “Poker players live in a world where that risk is made explicit. They can get comfortable with uncertainty because they put it up front in their decisions. Ignoring the risk and uncertainty in every decision might make us feel better in the short run, but the cost to the quality of our decision-making can be immense. If we can find ways to become more comfortable with uncertainty, we can see the world more accurately and be better for it.”

— Annie Duke

33. “We behave according to what we bring to the occasion.” Our beliefs affect how we process all new things, “whether the ‘thing’ is a football game, a presidential candidate, Communism, or spinach.”

— Annie Duke

34. “Whether it is the forming of a group of friends or a pod at work – or hiring for diversity of viewpoint and tolerance for dissent when you are able to guide an enterprise’s culture toward accuracy – we should guard against gravitating toward clones of ourselves. We should also recognize that it’s really hard: the norm is toward homogeneity; we’re all guilty of it; and we don’t even notice that we’re doing it.”

— Annie Duke

35. “Why might my belief not be true? What other evidence might be out there bearing on my belief? Are there similar areas I can look toward to gauge whether similar beliefs to mine are true? What sources of information could I have missed or minimized on the way to reaching my belief? What are the reasons someone else could have a different belief, what’s their support, and why might they be right instead of me? What other perspectives are there as to why things turned out the way they did?”

— Annie Duke

36. “The decisions we make in our lives – in business, saving and spending, health and lifestyle choices, raising our children, and relationships – easily fit von Neumann’s definition of “real games.” They involve uncertainty, risk, and occasional deception, prominent elements in poker. Trouble follows when we treat life decisions as if they were chess decisions.”

— Annie Duke

37. “Quit and grit are two sides of the exact same decision. Decision-making in the real world requires action without complete information. Quitting is the tool that allows us to react to new information that is revealed after we make a decision.”

— Annie Duke

38. “Once we are in a group that regularly reinforces exploratory thought, the routine becomes reflexive, running on its own. Exploratory thought becomes a new habit of mind, the new routine, and one that is self-reinforced.”

— Annie Duke

39. “When people quit on time, it will usually feel like they are quitting too early, because it will be long before they experience the choice as a close call.”

— Annie Duke

40. “By not quitting, you are missing out on the opportunity to switch to something that will create more progress toward your goals. Anytime you stay mired in a losing endeavor, that is when you are slowing your progress. Anytime you stick to something when there are better opportunities out there, that is when you are slowing your progress.”

— Annie Duke

41. “In large part, we are what we do, and our identity is closely connected with whatever we’re focused on, including our careers, relationships, projects, and hobbies. When we quit any of those things, we have to deal with the prospect of quitting part of our identity. And that is painful.”

— Annie Duke

42. “Experience is necessary for learning. But we process that experience in a biased way. This means that the very feedback you need to become a better decision-maker can interfere with your ability to learn good lessons from experience.”

— Annie Duke

43. “Figure out the hard thing first. Try to solve that as quickly as possible. Beware of false progress.”

— Annie Duke

44. “Determining whether a decision is good or bad means examining the quality of the beliefs informing the decision, the available options, and how the future might turn out given any choice you make.”

— Annie Duke

45. “At the moment that quitting becomes the objectively best choice, in practice things generally won’t look particularly grim, even though the present does contain clues that can help you figure out how the future might unfold. The problem is, perhaps because of our aversion to quitting, we tend to rationalize away the clues contained in the present that would allow us to see how bad things really are.”

— Annie Duke

46. “Here’s a secret: All guesses are educated guesses because there is almost no estimate you could make about which you literally know nothing.”

— Annie Duke

47. “RESULTING A mental shortcut in which we use the quality of an outcome to figure out the quality of a decision.”

— Annie Duke

48. “Most decisions have a mix of upside and downside potentials. When figuring out whether a decision is good or bad, you are essentially asking if the upside potential compensates for the risk of the downside.”

— Annie Duke

49. “A lot of experience can be an excellent teacher. A single experience, not so much. Looking across a large enough set of decisions and outcomes, we can start to tease out the lessons experience might offer us. Looking at just one outcome, we get resulting and hindsight bias.”

— Annie Duke

50. “When the outcome turns out poorly, it’s easy to focus on the details that suggest the decision process was poor. We think we are seeing the decision quality rationally because the bad process is obvious.”

— Annie Duke