How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

I’ve used Annie Duke's prequel “Thinking in Bets” to describe everything from understanding passive aggressive behavior to prioritizing work decisions. Her follow on book — part practical advice, part roll up your sleeves workbook, part behavioral science treatise - is superb and has become part of my go-to personal and business library (I read a pre-release copy of the manuscript, disclaimer, I have an acknowledgement). The book builds up your decision making acumen by forcing you to think about the frameworks — implicit or explicit — you’ve assembled over time. Some highlights: thinking about pre-mortems as a way to enumerate all possible failure modes and detect them before you end up in post-failure decision states. Differentiating earned or intentional outcomes — results of actions or decisions — from “luck” or outcomes that were not the result of a decision (whether this is losing to a 48-1 draw in poker or a confluence of bad events in the business world, it’s the same thing). Keying on decisions that are repeatable and outputs that create happiness for you; considering the impact of “free rolls” (decisions where there is limited downside for a good upside, like buying a lottery ticket or going on an informational job interview). Finally, I found the dissection of the language of probability quite powerful; it simply helps people to normalize their confidence and risk tolerance ranges using vernacular like “a lot” or “likely” and then translating that into actual, comparable ranges. My electronic copy is a ready reference; have already used the pre-mortem examples several times to play out the “This Is Us” trope of “What’s the worst that could happen?” When you examine your options using rigor, you eliminate some of those worst options.

Third book I read by Anna Duke! Enjoyed the book and the strategies she laid out for better decision making. However, she provided too many checklists and exercises, which sometimes seems to interfere with the flow of reading. I still recommend it though.

I dont do a lot of reviews. This book is awesome. Im reading it again as I got it on the weekend and really love it. Will highly recommend and also get her other book.

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.

Plenty of actionable decision frameworks. Talks about the role of cognitive biases in decision making and how to mitigate them. But I think a few long formed blog posts would suffice in explaining the core concepts

Annie Duke knows her stuff. She writes clearly, provides important ideas, recommendations, along with the tools to implement all of it. My favorite is the use of a journal. Unless you make a contemporary record of your reasons & thoughts leading up to and at the time of a decision, you cannot (at least I cannot) rely on memory well after the fact. Another useful tool she illustrates is the use of bounding, using the process of getting to a rough estimate of the weight of a bison in a photo. This author is extremely talented - and entertaining. I even enjoyed the acknowledgments - seemed to have more life than most. The footnotes and bibliography are also very useful & informative. So there are 3 things I'd like Ms Duke to consider: 1. Flash Cards for the definitions in the book. 2. A laminated outline similar to BarCharts Quick Study series 3. Finally - I want to know the alternative titles suggested by Prof Kahneman!

Excellent read

Bom compêndio de ferramentas para você poder avaliar suas tomadas de decisões. Um conceito que gostei é a separação entre "Resultados de Qualidade" e "Decisões de Qualidade" que ajuda a pessoa ou grupo decisor entender melhor se já temos as informações suficientes e de qualidade para a tomada de decisão com qualidade, quanto também entender se aquela decisão acarretaria um resultado de qualidade. Combine este livro com outro livro chamado "Decisões inteligentes". Pode ser um complemento bom para mostrar para altas lideranças o seu racional para uma decisão específica que você pensou.

Decent read. Some of it is pretty basic but overall solid book that focuses on the decision making process not the results

Buen libro, con ejercicios incluidos, te ayuda con decisiones a largo plazo

I don't think there is anything new here. It is all derived from others. But it does useful tie things together, and is clearly written. There is value in doing the exercises.