by Annie Duke
Imagine getting into an accident at an intersection after losing control of your car on a patch of ice you couldn’t see. Your first thought would likely be that you got unlucky. But what if you had to bet on that? Depending on the details, there would be a lot of alternatives to just plain bad luck you would now consider. Based on the weather, maybe you could have anticipated some ice on the road. Maybe you were driving too fast for the weather conditions. Once the car started sliding, maybe you could have steered differently or maybe you pumped the brakes when you shouldn’t have. Maybe you could have taken a safer route, choosing a main road that would have been salted. Maybe you should have kept the Mustang in the garage and taken the Suburban.
Some of the reasons we come up with may be easy to discount. And some may not. The key is that in explicitly recognizing that the way we field an outcome is a bet, we consider a greater number of alternative causes more seriously than we otherwise would have. That is truthseeking. This is what Phil Ivey does.
The prospect of a bet makes us examine and refine our beliefs, in this case the belief about whether luck or skill was the main influence in the way things turned out. Betting on what we believe makes us take a closer look by making explicit what is already implicit: we have a great deal at risk in assessing why anything turned out the way it did. That sure sounds like a bet worth taking seriously.
When we treat outcome fielding as a bet, it pushes us to field outcomes more objectively into the appropriate buckets because that is how bets are won. Winning feels good. Winning is a positive update to our personal narrative. Winning is a reward. With enough practice, reinforced by the reward of feeling good about ourselves, thinking of fielding outcomes as bets will become a habit of mind.
Thinking in bets triggers a more open-minded exploration of alternative hypotheses, of reasons supporting conclusions opposite to the routine of self-serving bias. We are more likely to explore the opposite side of an argument more often and more seriously—and that will move us closer to the truth of the matter.
Thinking in bets also triggers perspective taking, leveraging the difference between how we field our own outcomes versus others’ outcomes to get closer to the objective truth. We know we tend to discount the success of our peers and place responsibility firmly on their shoulders for their failures. A good strategy for figuring out which way to bet would be to imagine if that outcome had happened to us. If a competitor closes a big sale, we know about our tendency to discount their skill. But if we imagine that we had been the one who closed the sale, we are more likely to find the things to give them credit for, that they did well and that we can learn from. Likewise, when we close the big sale, let’s spare a little of the self-congratulations and, instead, examine that great result the way we’d examine it if it happened to someone else. We’ll be more likely to find the things we could have done even better and identify those factors that we had no control over. Perspective taking gets us closer to the truth because that truth generally lies in the middle of the way we field outcomes for ourselves and the way we field them for others. By taking someone else’s perspective, we are more likely to land in that middle ground.
Once we start actively training ourselves in testing alternative hypotheses and perspective taking, it becomes clear that outcomes are rarely 100% luck or 100% skill. This means that when new information comes in, we have options beyond unquestioned confirmation or reversal. We can modify our beliefs along a spectrum because we know it is a spectrum, not a choice between opposites without middle ground.
This makes us more compassionate, both toward ourselves and others. Treating outcome fielding as bets constantly reminds us outcomes are rarely attributable to a single cause and there is almost always uncertainty in figuring out the various causes. 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.
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.
You also become more compassionate toward other people when you treat fielding outcomes as bets. When you look at the outcomes of others from their perspective, you have to ask yourself, “What if that had happened to me?” You come up with more compassionate assessments of other people where bad things aren’t always their fault and good things aren’t always luck. You are more likely to walk in their shoes. Imagine how Bartman’s life would have changed if more people worked to think this way.
The hard way
Thinking in bets is hard, especially initially. It has to start as a deliberative process, and will feel clunky, weird, and slow. Certainly, there will be times it doesn’t make sense. Like if you don’t get a promotion at work, you’re probably going to wonder how you’re supposed to feel better acknowledging that so-and-so was more deserving and that you could learn a lot from them. It takes work to avoid the temptation to blame it on the boss being a jerk who doesn’t know how to evaluate talent.
That feeling is natural. I built my poker career out of these principles of learning and truthseeking, yet I still catch myself falling into the self-serving bias and motivated reasoning traps. Duhigg tells us that reshaping a habit requires time, preparation, practice, and repetition.
Look at other kinds of habit changes. If I had a habit of getting out of bed at midnight to eat a cookie, it takes work as well as will to change that habit. I have to identify the habit I want to change, figure out the routine to substitute, and practice that routine in deliberative mind until the habit is reshaped. I would need to stock apples in the house, and keep them more readily available than cookies. Then I need to actually eat the apple at midnight instead of reaching for the cookie, repeating this routine until it becomes a new habit. That takes work and willpower and time.
Despite the difficulties, striving for accuracy through probabilistic thinking is a worthwhile routine to pursue. For one thing, it won’t always be so difficult. We have to start doing this with deliberation and effort, but it eventually becomes a habit of mind. Just like declaring uncertainty in your beliefs, it eventually goes from a somewhat goofy and awkward extra step to a habit integral to how you view the world around you.
To be sure, thinking in bets is not a miracle cure. Thinking in bets won’t make self-serving bias disappear or motivated reasoning vanish into thin air. But it will make those things better. And a little bit better is all we need to transform our lives. If we field just a few extra outcomes more accurately, if we catch just a few extra learning opportunities, it will make a huge difference in what we learn, when we learn, and how much we learn.
Poker’s compressed version of real-world decision-making showed me how being a little better at decision-making could make a big difference. A poker game can consist of a few hundred hands. Every hand can require up to twenty decisions. If, over the course of a game, there were a hundred outcomes that provided learning opportunities and we caught ten of them, we would still be missing 90% of our chances to learn. We wouldn’t have transcended the way our brains function and built ourselves a different brain, but we don’t need to. If our opponents are people like Nick the Greek, they are missing almost every learning opportunity. We’re obviously going to do better than they do just catching 10%. If another of our opponents is someone just like us, but who isn’t working to transform their outcome-processing routines, maybe they (this prior version of ourselves) will pick
up five opportunities. Again, we are missing 90%, and we are still going to clean up on an opponent who is trying to learn but doesn’t know how.*
The benefits of recognizing just a few extra learning opportunities compound over time. The cumulative effect of being a little better at decision-making, like compounding interest, can have huge effects in the long run on everything that we do. When we catch that extra occasional learning opportunity, it puts us in a better position for future opportunities of the same type. Any improvement in our decision quality puts us in a better position in the future. Think of it like a ship sailing from New York to London. If the ship’s navigator introduces a one-degree navigation error, it would start off as barely noticeable. Unchecked, however, the ship would veer farther and farther off course and would miss London by miles, as that one-degree miscalculation compounds mile over mile. Thinking in bets corrects your course. And even a small correction will get you more safely to your destination.
The first step is identifying the habit of mind that we want to reshape and how to reshape it. That first step is hard and takes time and effort and a lot of missteps along the way. So the second step is recognizing that it is easier to make these changes if we aren’t alone in the process. Recruiting help is key to creating faster and more robust change, strengthening and training our new truthseeking routines.
CHAPTER 4
The Buddy System
“Maybe you’re the problem, do you think?”
When Lauren Conrad, star of MTV’s The Hills, appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman in October 2008, her interview took an unexpected turn. The first minute was standard talk-show banter for a twenty-two-year-old star of a successful reality series: the amount of drama in her life. Less than a minute later, Conrad asked Letterman if he was calling her an idiot.
She started off the interview by discussing her ongoing feud with her by-then-former roommate Heidi Montag and Heidi’s boyfriend Spencer Pratt. In case you’re not familiar, here is the backstory: Lauren and Heidi’s friendship ended when they came to blows at a birthday party after Lauren accused Heidi and Spencer of starting rumors that she had made a sex tape. In addition, Lauren developed friendships with Stephanie (Spencer’s sister) and Holly (Heidi’s sister), complicating the social and family encounters of everyone involved. Lauren tried without success to strengthen the relationship between her roommates, Audrina and Lo. This strained Lauren’s friendship with Audrina, who reestablished her friendship with Heidi. Brody Jenner was also in the mix, dating Lauren, questioning her date with a Teen Vogue model, dating someone else himself, arguing with Spencer about his friendship with Lauren, getting accused of starting the rumors about Lauren’s sex tape, etc.
All of that drama happening in Conrad’s life is what David Letterman was referring to when he interjected, “That raises the question, maybe you’re the problem, do you think?” That quip sent an interview that was supposed to be a puffy, promotional chat into an uncomfortable tailspin.
Letterman immediately realized that he had taken the conversation into much deeper, more serious territory than either of them could have anticipated. He tried to soften the blow in a self-deprecating way, adding that he had done the same thing, for years refusing to close the learning loop by assuming everybody around him was an idiot.
“Let me give you an example from my own life. . . . For a long time . . . I thought, ‘Geez, people are idiots.’ Then it occurred to me, ‘Is it possible that everybody’s an idiot? Maybe I’m the idiot,’ and it turns out I am.”
Conrad clearly didn’t want to hear it, replying, “Does that make me an idiot, then?” Websites devoted to reality TV, gossip, media, and popular culture immortalized the moment, and that’s how they saw it: Letterman “basically calls Conrad an idiot” (Gawker.com), “ripped into” Conrad (Trendhunter.com), “makes fun of Lauren Conrad” (Starpulse.com).
Letterman’s comment was actually quite perceptive. His mistake was offering up the insight in an inappropriate forum to someone who hadn’t agreed to that kind of truthseeking exchange.
Conrad certainly had a lot of drama in her life: enough that MTV created two successive shows to document it. But, like most people do, she characterized the drama as a series of things happening to her. In other words, the drama was outside her control (luck). Letterman suggested some of it could be fielded into the skill bucket, a suggestion that might have been helpful to Conrad in the future if she had been receptive to it. Not surprisingly, she wasn’t.
Letterman had offered the helpful alternative hypothesis, unexpectedly, on a late-night talk show where the norm is fluff and PR. Perhaps Letterman’s approach would have been more appropriate in an Oprah Winfrey–style prime-time interview. Or on one of those reality therapy shows where reality stars agree to such an exchange. As it was, he violated the assumed social contract by challenging Conrad to bet on her outcome fielding when she hadn’t agreed to truthseek with him.
That exchange was similar to my interaction at the poker tournament with the six-seven of diamonds guy. I thought he was asking for my advice, so I responded by asking for more information to get an idea of whether he accurately fielded his losing outcome as luck. He was expecting me to adhere to the norm of being a sympathetic ear for a hard-luck story. When I attempted to delve into the details, I violated this implied contract. I Lettermanned him.
Such interactions are reminders that not all situations are appropriate for truthseeking, nor are all people interested in the pursuit. That being said, any of us who wants to get better at thinking in bets would benefit from having more David Lettermans in our lives. As the “original” Letterman learned from the awkward exchange with Lauren Conrad, Lettermanning needs agreement by both parties to be effective.
The red pill or the blue pill?
In the classic science-fiction film The Matrix, when Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) meets Morpheus (the hero-hacker played by Laurence Fishburne), Neo asks Morpheus to tell him what “the matrix” is. Morpheus offers to show Neo, giving him the choice between taking a blue pill and a red pill.
“You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.”
As Neo reaches toward a pill, Morpheus reminds him, “Remember, all I am offering is the truth. Nothing more.”
Neo chooses to see the world as it really is. He takes the red pill and is pounded with a series of devastating truths. His comfortable world is a dream created by machines to enslave him as an energy source. His job and lifestyle, his clothes, his appearance, and the entire fabric of his life are an illusion implanted in his brain. In the actual world, taking the red pill causes his body to be unplugged from his feeding pod, flushed into a sewer, and picked up by Morpheus’s pirate ship, the Nebuchadnezzar. As rebels against the machines, Morpheus and his crew (and now Neo, due to his choice) live in cramped quarters, sleep in uncomfortable cells, eat gruel, and wear rags. Machines are out to destroy them.
The trade-off is that Neo sees the world as it actually is and, in the end, gets to defeat the machines that have enslaved humanity.
In the movie, the matrix was built to be a more comfortable version of the world. Our brains, likewise, have evolved to make our version of the world more comfortable: our beliefs are nearly always correct; favorable outcomes are the result of our skill; there are plausible reasons why unfavorable outcomes are beyond our control; and we compare favorably with our peers. We deny or at least dilute the most painful parts of the message.
Giving that up is not the easiest choice. Living in the matrix is comfortable. So is the natural way we process information to protect our self-image in the moment. By choosing to exit the matrix, we are asserting that striving for a more objective representation of the world, even if it is uncomfortable at times, will make us happier and more successful in the long run.
But it’s a trade-off that isn’t for everyone; it must be freely chosen to be productive and sustainable. Morpheus (unlike Letterman) didn’t just go around ripping people out of the matrix against their will. He asked Neo to make the choice and exit the matrix with him.
If you have gotten this far in this book, I’m guessing that you are choosing the red pill over the blue pill.
When I started playing poker, I chose truthseeking. Like Neo, I did it reluctantly and wasn’t sure what I was getting into. My brother took a blunt approach with me. My instinct was to complain about my bad luck and to marvel at how poorly others played, decrying the injustice of any hand I might have lost. He wanted to talk about where I had questions about my strategic decisions, where I felt I might have made mistakes, and where I was confused on what to do in a hand. I recognized he was passing along the approach he learned with his friends, a group of smart, analytical East Coast players, many of whom, like Erik Seidel,* were on their way to establishing themselves as legends at the game. In addition to introducing me to this approach, he also encouraged these phenomenal professionals to treat me as a peer when discussing poker.
I was lucky to have access at such an early stage in my career to this group of world-class players who became my learning pod in poker. And I was also lucky that if I wanted to engage that group about poker, I had to ask about my strategic decisions. I had to resist my urge to moan about my bad luck and focus instead on where I felt I might have made mistakes and where I was confused on what to do in a hand. Because I agreed to the group’s rules of engagement, I had to learn to focus on the things I could control (my own decisions), let go of the things I couldn’t (luck), and work to be able to accurately tell the difference between the two.