Because of the role of luck in our lives we need to be able to differentiate the quality of our decision and its outcome. That’s a key lesson I learnt from an excellent book ‘Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts‘ by Annie Duke, a professional poker player turned business speaker and author.
We have a tendency to equate the quality of our decisions with their outcome. “Poker players have a word for this : “resulting”. When I started playing poker , more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting , cautioning me to resist the temptation to change my strategy just because a few hands didn’t turn out well in the short run“.
This distinction is profound and I do fall into this trap too. Like almost everybody: “ask any group members to come […] with a brief description of their best and worst decisions of the previous year . I have yet to come across someone who doesn’t identify their best and worst results rather than their best and worst decisions .”
I am committing to try to discern the quality of the decision versus its outcome, because I believe it is important when it comes to improving one’s decision-making ability.
